Word: peasant
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...reminds me a lot of West Side Story-- sometimes even in ways that. American critics might think of as suburban middle-class: one of the newsreels has a long animated cartoon about some rose-cheeked children sticking buttons on a snowman. On the other hand, at the museum of peasant art near Sian, though the paintings were all cheerful--the director said the art teachers who travel around to communes would probably use a peasant's depressing painting for "teaching by negative example"--I liked most of them very much; they seemed a lot like Unicef Christmas cards...
Also in the cast are the studious camp follower Roman Polanski (playing a peasant) and the late Vittorio De Sica, who, even acting and primping as broadly as he does, lends the proceedings a few fleeting moments of dignity. Morrissey has little time for dignity, how ever. He has, for the moment, forsaken his customary languor; it is this rejuvenated spirit - perhaps a result of all the blood - that gives Andy Warhol's Dracula its few silly, phantom pleasures...
...That his peasant drama succeeds so well lies in the music. Just as there are no heroes, there are no big arias or set-piece scenes. Not that the opera is merely a modified tone poem; it is compellingly dramatic. In style, there may be a bit of Mascagni pageantry here, an arioso there that could have flown right out of Butterfly. But the sound is distinct and modern, punctuated by post-romantic dissonances. Then there are charming interludes peculiar to Janáček. He loved duplicating spoken inflections and rhythms in sung speech. He doted on mini three...
...about adolescence and incest, a comedy of sexual manners. Lacombe, Lucien is an unlikely sequel, as morally provocative a film about the question of social and individual guilt as has ever been made. The bare bones of the story go something like this: In June, 1944, a dispossessed young peasant of southwestern France drifts into collaboration, makes love to a young Jewish refugee and is executed by the Resistance. But it is the complications of the plot that are emphasized, not the outline. Outlines--though no film or history can be much more than an outline--leave out the nuances...
Lucien's actions are produced by the reaction of external events on instincts, and his instincts are peasant instincts. In the middle of a pitched battle between the collaborators and members of the maquis holed out in a farm-house, Lucien catches sight of the ripple of a hare darting through the high grass and instantly turns to fire at it. The first thing he does after shooting the German officer who has come to take France and her grandmother away to a concentration camp is to steal a gold watch from the dead man--a watch the German...