Word: olenska
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...late-19th century New York, "The Age of Innocence" tells the tale of the reintroduction of the Countess Olenska (played by Michelle Pfeiffer, with a shocking perm) to New York high society, after a decades-long sojourn in Europe with her husband. The Countess has made a bad marriage and is now returned to the bosoms of her former associates sans Count and hoping to divorce, which casts her as a fallen woman in the eyes of this morally puritanical--though decadent--crowd. Newland Archer (played by a stalwart yet at times wistful Daniel Day-Lewis), the intellectually curious scion...
...York society of the 1870s, Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a true romantic gentleman. He is romantic because he wants to shrug off the opera cape of domestic respectability and follow his heart to hell with the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). He is a gentleman because, having already declared his love to pretty May Welland (Winona Ryder), he is bound to behave honorably. He knows that when passion and propriety collide, only bitter defeat may rise from the wreckage...
...heroine is Ellen Olenska, May's cousin, now separated from her European aristocrat husband and thus the subject of purring rumor from the town's smooth hypocrites. As the radiantly giddy May seems a child to Newland, so he feels like a boy in Ellen's presence. The two fall in furtive love. But it is not falling so much as tiptoeing in the dark. Once he kisses her slipper; later he unbuttons her glove and kisses her wrist, then her mouth, which opens more in anguish than in lust. Guilt is the barrier between their lips. And both could...