Word: passion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...much ado about very little. But the opening-night A.B.T. quartet made it worth watching - such is the strength and dynamism of these dancers' stage personalities. Bare to the waist and clad only in white tights, Baryshnikov offered a tortured Hamlet rather than a brooding one, all quicksilver passion. Kirkland's Ophelia was an innocent, ethereal waif - bruised and bewildered. In a pas de deux with Baryshnikov, their bodies seemed perfectly attuned, suggesting that incandescent union of talents and temperaments they have displayed as partners in better works. Bruhn's Claudius was a cold, imperious, lecherous king...
RUFFAUT IS AT pains at the beginning of his latest film to assure his audience that the events they are seeing are real. The rest of the film is so austere and exemplary that it's hard to believe the truth can be so simple; Adele's passion is so inhuman that it seems to cry out for the reenactment of an affidavit to its reality...
...last half century have people become accustomed to such testimonies to the power of love when one of the partners is utterly unworthy to the idea that it is not who love is for but the love itself that is significant.. Adele throws herself into her passion with all the depth and purity of Juliet or Petrarch--but her lover is no Romeo or Laura, only a devil-may-care womanizing young lieutenant in the 16th Hussars...
Surprisingly, Truffaut chose not to build the film solely out of psychological depth and intensity. The Story of Adele H. alternates between the depth of Adele's passion and the uncomprehending world around her. The audience is not subjected to and unrelieved barrage of profundity. The strange thing about Truffaut's perspective is that the everyday world doesn't destroy Adele, doesn't hamper her, and doesn't seem devalued compared with her own state of mind. Adele destroys herself while the world looks on benignly. With the exception of the callous (though not evil) lieutenant there are only good...
...Pamela Payton-Wright's Laura is hauntingly evocative, a vision of a doe at bay. An actress who has done varied parts in the past several years, she is a pointilliste who composes every dot in a role into a harmonic whole. When she releases the driving passion she seems to possess, she may become an actress of immense power...