Word: hauteur
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Each member of the cast continues the accentuation of exaggerated hilarity, making sure their take on the theme is appropriate to their role. Sarah E. Stein ’08 plays Domina, Hero’s overbearing mother, with appropriately overblown hauteur. The sleazy profligacy of Lycus, the slave-owner (embodied by Justin V. Rodriguez ’07) contrasts well with the wistfully innocent Hero and the glib Pseudolus. Each individual character’s excesses are played to the fullest in their songs. Here, Sondheim’s score is as snappy and melodic as ever...
...wasn't one to spit out rapid-fire dialogue, a vocal reticence that would have limited her roles even in a color-blind Hollywood. Saucy comedy, of the sort Jean Harlow personified, was out, as was the scalding, wiseacre melodrama, Barbara Stanwyck-style. Wong could flash a regal hauteur and, when called for, that sensuality. She could have played grand-dame roles of the sort essayed by Garbo - she certainly could match the Swede for fascination, and self-fascination - but not, say, Marlene Dietrich, whose awareness of her power over men was always comic and ironic...
This is a perfectly amiable book but never even slightly a surprising one. Mayle wears smooth the cliches about the French--how their hauteur can be impeccable and their plumbing imponderable, how they drive too fast and have those jaunty bosoms. You imagine Mayle making his checklist of the bits of Provencal color to be sprinkled around the story. Old men playing boules in the village square. Check. Fragrant disks of goat cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves. Check. Funny Englishman mangling the French tongue. Check. You have to admire his tireless attention to food and drink, to cassoulets "humming with...
...glance to all the fabulous women in the cast. The camera, mainly manned by Christopher Doyle, prowls around the women like a lover in the first flush of passion. It captures and caresses the actresses' radiance: Lau's bold sensuality, Faye Wong's elfin resiliency, Gong Li's fragile hauteur. Zhang, in a panoply of pouts, flirtations and surrendering smiles, is at her most ravishing and nuanced, especially when swathed in the spectacular cheongsams of costumer designer (and editor and production designer) William Chang...
...Sydow, alighting from the Ingmar Bergman films, certainly brings height and hauteur to the role - and if you're going for the Renaissance masters' vision of Jesus as a European, he might as well be Nordic. (Though, as I was reminded by TIME.com's Tony Karon, my guru in all things political, Jesus was a Semite; if he was tall, lank, bearded and dressed in flowing robes, as von Sydow is, the person he would have resembled most would be...Osama bin Laden.) The actor's iconographic superiority gives this Jesus the big frosty balls to tell his followers...