Word: mme
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...trouble starts when Mme Arcati (Fatima Mahdi), a bicycling enthusiast and old-fashioned medium given to "ectoplasmic manifestations" enters the scene. Madhdi's Mme Arcati is a short overly made-up lightening-tongued horror, but since this is precisely what Coward must have intended, Mahdi must be credited with a truly inspired bit of comic acting...
...epiphianies of the Geist, the spirit. Anything less than that was not worth I having. Being a Russian, Kanmdinsky had been formed by the tradition of the religious icon. But he was also a Theosophist, an ardent follower of one of the most influential gurus of the day, Mme. Blavatsky, and the cultural centers of Europe, including Munich, were as full of odd parareligious cults then as California is now. It was Mme. Blavatsky's opinion that before long the material world would vanish, leaving behind its "essence," a world of spirit. Elect souls, the survivors of this benevolent...
...becomes just that. In a piece on folk recipes-a pint of warm beer stirred with a hot poker will cure backache, a slab of raw beef will rub away a wart-the reporter edges deliciously close to magic herself. Even the inventory of the purple velvet handbag of Mme. Houdin, ten-year-old Sylvia's French tutor, becomes a litany of talismans to ward off disaster: smelling salts, two thimbles, a photograph of M. Houdin, the number of madame's life-insurance policy, and "a rather neglected rosary...
...handles it here with a detachment that never becomes dispassion, a generous and evenhanded sympathy for both its victims that is not allowed to slip into melodrama, satire or even irony. This time, in fact, he provides a surrogate for himself in the person of an older woman, Mme. Jouve (Véronique Silver), the manager of the tennis club where much of the action takes place. She is gray, like the subdued light of the film itself. She is quotidian in her concerns, as Truffaut is in the selection of the details by which he illuminates the good, separate...
...Their venal mother has farmed them out as domestic servants. In one revealing scene, an early employer flicks through a pile of dinner napkins that Léa has ironed and airily tosses half of them on the floor as insufficiently impeccable. The eventual demise of their present mistress, Mme. Danzard (Anne Pitoniak), is built on such moments, and the murder is a strange admixture of revolt and matricide. Throughout, the play is charged with the alternating currents of cozy domesticity and a sense of how the French Revolution began...