Word: loving
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...matter how many critics bash this movie, chances are that hordes of romantics are still going to go see it, even if “Love, Actually” is ten times better. Though the latter film has as big an ensemble cast, it somehow manages to connect to a viewer, likely because the movie’s plot does not unfold over such a limited time-span...
...fuel the heavily psychological and minimally plot-driven narrative. However, the same characteristics that give Aciman his writerly credentials—his finely tuned cultural references and the delicate register of his artistic understanding—are trivial ornaments that cannot disguise the stagnant quality of the central love story. Though the characters are undoubtedly clever and sardonic, their emotional interplay fails to conjure the feeling of sublimation that Aciman is striving to evoke...
...plot is unabashedly gimmicky, clashing with Aciman’s rhythmic and ornamented sentences. “Eight White Nights” opens with a (heavily repeated) hook—“I am Clara”—with which the main love interest introduces herself. It then breaks into an eight-part narrative, in which each part chronicles a different night that the unnamed narrator spends with Clara. He meets her while lurking behind the tree at a Christmas party and is instantly and fatally drawn towards her. Smart and mean, Clara scintillates with brilliance...
...bulk of the narrative follows the protagonist and his longings, desires, and solipsistic rants as he yearns after Clara and analyses her every gesture. Though laden with the narrator’s passionate obsession for Clara, “Eight White Nights” chronicles an essentially chaste love. Aciman denies the reader the full range of the sensuous prose that he unquestionably mastered in his first novel, “Call Me By Your Name,” and consequently creates a more emotionally tentative work...
...deep emotional vulnerability. Clara and the narrator escape concrete thoughts and feelings by inventing these hollow terms, constantly side-stepping each other in a never-ending verbal jousting match. Building a universe out of words, secret terms and code phrases is a compelling and imaginative way to portray a love affair. However, when the narrator deploys phrases as ridiculous as ‘Vishnukrishnu Vindalu moment’ with absolute earnestness, the story begins slipping off the emotional precipice on which Aciman wants to balance...