Word: lovelies
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cruel society is. But it's an unconvincing argument. No matter how we hide it, it is the fags--and the fags alone--whom we are deriding. That's how audiences work. A few years ago, the musical Cabaret learned something similar during its Boston tryout. One mock love song between the ghoulish and decadent German emcee and a fake gorilla ended with the emcee assuring us, "And if you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn't look Jewish at all!" Immediately we laughed. Brilliant! The audience had been forced into the anti-Semitic posture the play...
...young innocent who has become a cruel opportunist, try to express his honest concern for Mona (Frank Storace). Under Patricia Flynn's direction, the conversation, the pleading, the reaching, and the grappling tumbles out so quickly that an audience can't sort out all that is happening. We see love as the confusing and desperate and tortured state it sometimes it. And, for once, we feel it, when the two men are denied the humanity they seek. And there is no laughter, no laughter to protect...
...entering college takes a room opening onto a courtyard garden. One day he sees an extraordinarily beautiful girl walking among the exotic flowers, and approaches her. Despite her extreme shyness and the warnings of a family friend (a professional rival of the brilliant Dr. Rappaccini), Giovanni wins the love of Beatrice Rappaccini. The garden's flowers are, however, poisonous; Beatrice, having grown up in the garden, lives on them. When Giovanni discovers this he gives her an antidote, only to kill her and (in Hawthorne's version) to discover that he now needs poison to live--as planned...
Robert Edelstein is better able than anyone to make this bizarre fantasy into a film. His three previous films (one, Sally's Hounds, shown this fall in the New York City Film Festival's experimental series) were built on the same themes: the frightening distance between people in love, the ideal appearance of loved figures, and above all the mental experience of people in love. Edelstein takes this mental experience and objectifies it in every shot. The Boys and Their Girls, for example, has a sequence in a swimming pool. Cutting up girls' bodies and swimming motions and intercutting...
...visual style of Rappaccini thus synthesizes personal emotions, personal development, plot, and thematic development into a single drama. It's the perfect way to put Hawthorne's romance into film. This type of romance, designed to describe personal development through emotional (above all, love) experience, requires its characters' sentiments to seem real and strong so that their actions will feel sufficiently motivated. Edelstein establishes the objectivity, indeed the rule, of his characters' emotional experience. Their actions are completely determined by their emotions, and since these emotions form the world of his film, the entire drama proceeds with a chilling inevitability...