Word: irena
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...anitra (Venetian wheat pasta with poached duck) and baked spaghetti pie with cinnamon-flavored cream and eggs for dessert. Pasta cookbooks are churned out with dizzying regularity. Mostly written by Italians, they are generally excellent; for instance, Sicilian-descended Carlo Middione's new Pasta! Cooking It, Loving It (Irena Chalmers Cookbooks). Accessories for making pasta proliferate: drying machines, ravioli crimpers, cutting wheels, rolling pins, tomato presses, electric cheese graters and dies to make dozens of special shapes like creste di galli (cockscombs) and capelli di preti (small priests' hats...
...Irena recoils in horror and disbelief. She has already fallen in love with another man--the curator...
Innocent yet animal. Irena embodies the conflict between the two natures of sexuality, and Kinski, emulating her success in Tess, gives an admirable performance. Though the sexual theme holds great potential for creating vivid, powerful characters, Irena could be played by a stuffed animal. The audience, primed with Cinderella fairytales and pubescent fantasies, already knows Irena's conflict. And so director Paul Schrader (American Gigolo, Hardcore. Blue Collar) uses his characters as no more than props...
McDowell's performance as the brother comes closest to avoiding sterile characterization. A minister of a Pentecostal sect. Paul has struggled desperately to overcome his affliction through religious faith. But Schrader gives only a taste of Paul's struggle and abruptly throws the focus back to Irena...
While the characters are shallow, everything else reeks of over-kill. The sex scenes are unnecessarily explicit, and Schrader revels in giving us the gamut on perversion from bestiality and incest to kink and sado-masochism. Schrader also isn't much interested in generating suspense. When Irena suddenly wanders through a surreal Cajun bayou, the audience is too confused to be worried. Occasionally Schrader resorts to the cheap device of startling the viewer--something appears suddenly or moves when it shouldn't. All in all, Cat People is as imaginative as coitus interruptus--and about as subtle...