Word: isak
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Each new sequence reveals a fresh anxiety in the life of Isak X, the protagonist. During the course of a single day, when he drives across Sweden to receive an award for fifty years of service to the medical profession, he experiences a sort of mid-life crisis 40 years too late. Glimpses of his old haunts stir memories, the presence of his daughter-in-law and several hitchhikers conjure up old associations, and above all, his disturbing dreams indicate his fears and failings...
...Wild Strawberries" wins its audience's sympathy by placing them and the protagonist in the same predicament. Characters and audience alike are all trying to make sense of Isak's life, to understand how such an outwardly successful old man could be so inwardly confused. The narration does not take the condescendingly didactic, omniscient tone of other looking-back-on-life flicks, creating a sort of "And a Fjord Runs Through It." Instead, it generates an air of expectation by hinting at grandiose themes without explicitly laying claim to them...
...they are cheaper both to launch and to keep running, and every season brings one. Broadway last week had three: Tracey Ullman impersonating '50s stage mother Florence Aadland in a tour de force that has just closed; Jackie Mason opining about almost everything; and Julie Harris portraying writer Isak Dinesen. Off-Broadway, Eileen Atkins appears as Virginia Woolf. Artistically, these shows recall the theater's primal origins in storytelling. At best they offer unexcelled emotional intimacy between actor and audience. At worst they lack dramatic movement and reveal character in the most obvious way: by declaiming, instead of through...
...Africa (1985). Sydney Pollack's romantic adventure movie showed that Hollywood could still make 'em like it used to, with as much power and more subtlety. Meryl Streep had her most popular role as author Isak Dinesen, her restless heart liberated by the untamed beauty of Kenya...
BABETTE'S FEAST Cooking is a metaphor for art in Gabriel Axel's wise, deeply ironic and richly realized adaptation of Isak Dinesen's story...