Word: passione
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Duvall faces a tougher time with his role, largely because of an incompletely drawn character, and consequently he cannot evoke him as clearly. The origin of Tom's passion--which is directed mostly at nailing Des's crooked benefactor--seems obscure, especially compared to Des's obvious motivation. Sibling rivalry is part of it, but not all. Tom may be seeking a kind of absolution for leading a life so much less holy than his brother's, but that too seems inadequate to explain his obsessive vendetta. Not even Duvall's gritty and angry performance can make it clear. Perhaps...
...protagonist of Eric Rohmer's intelligently talkative movie, is every bit as bonkers over his lady as William Hurt is over Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. And Anne (Marie Rivière) is very possibly a greater pain to be with. Too self-absorbed even to fake passion, she does not seem to take even mildly sadistic pleasure in making François, among others, dance to her off-key tunes. It may be that she unconsciously seeks revenge because she has been jilted by her married lover, the aviator of the title, but that is not a connection...
...spirit. This, alas, is something François does not notice. The most the movie concedes him is the possibility that by sorting through his many wrong assumptions about the essentially innocent man he was following, he may have taken a small step toward extricating himself from his deluding passion. But like everything else in this sidelong glance of a movie, that point is, at most, implied. He has a long road to travel before he finds the freedom to respond to life as Rohmer does-with a wry sigh. The director of such wittily profound films as My Night...
Pinter lays suitably simple stagings across this background--frameworks for passion and its absence that play off one another. Most attention falls on the Victorian drama, in which Christopher Irons plays an aristocratic dabbler at science, Charles Smithson, whose plans for marriage are torn apart by his vision of the haunting face of Meryl Streep at the end of a long sea wall, wind and waves crashing about her. Smithson spends the rest of the film trying to understand the reason for her remarkable, extraordinary look...
...flame is too bright to ignore. Streep's not-quite-pretty face, which should have been just the object of Smithson's passion, becomes instead the most memorable thing in the film. Streep, almost by accident, takes over the stage whenever she enters. Irons is good--his aristocratic gentility and his moments of anger both stand out clearly--but he can't compare to Streep's magic. Streep, as the Scarlet Woman of Lyme Regis, has to convey an obscure, flighty vulnerability, always looking away from the camera and Smithson. And always she has at her disposal that piercing stare...