Word: pastel
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Peter Jackson's black comedy, "Heavenly Creatures," is a dizzying pastel debacle of school-girl passion, wild imagination and murderous ambition. The film version of the true story is set in mid-1950s Christchurch, New Zealand. Is it coincidental that "Picnic at Hanging Rock," another tale of school-girl mayhem, is set in nearby Australia? In any case, historical fact is wrapped up in Jackson's fictional version like grotesque reality in frilly paper--this film is a deliciously unpleasant surprise package...
European masters endeavored to create visions of sensual paradise concurrent with the political utopianism of the age by arraying dabs of pastel to convey gardens, canals and the like while subject, style, and color coaxed and relaxed viewers into bubble-bath bliss. American painters such as Walter Farndon, N.A., took a while to learn of the trends emanating from the Romantic school, but were not long to follow suit...
...long and productive years, the artist America knew in a variety of styles and associated with a variety of movements gathered awards and national recognition without ever achieving the international fame of the masters who influenced his work. For years, Farndon heightened his sense of the delicate harmony of pastel pinks, blues and light greens that modified the color scales made popular by such notables as Monet and the atmospheric exuberance of Renoir before darkening his palette to imitate the growing popularity of the post-impressionists...
...midst of this profound moral confusion, the Haiti crisis came like a test from on high. Here were good and evil laid out in black and white, or rather, black and creamy mulatto: the pastel luxury of Petionville vs. the dark, bottomless misery of the shantytowns. And in Jean-Bertrand Aristide, here was as Christ-like a figure as ever headed a state: devout, dedicated to the poor, and celibate on top of all that. Yet from Clinton's flip-flops to Carter's flirtation with Cedras, we dithered shamefully. Even after the troops had arrived, it was unclear...
...this haunted fairyland, the director creates images of exquisite rightness from a pristine, pastel palette, lifting the viewer's senses into a delicate rapture. The mood, the pacing, the search for beauty in a harsh society are ever so -- how shall we say? -- Vietnamese. Yet the film was not made in Vietnam. It could not have been: the country has hardly any film industry. So Tran, whose family immigrated to France in 1975, when he was 12, and who describes his film as a tribute to "the freshness and beauty of my mother's gestures," shot the film...