Word: perfect
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Despair is quite an undertaking for a film artist. Herman Hermann is so disatisfied with messy, imperfect reality that he concocts a work of art--the perfect murder--and attempts to immortalize it in the ordered, finite world of a novel he writes. Stoppard's great innovation is that he sees the story not from its uniquely literary angle, but from its general artistic one: Is not cinema an art form, too? Can't movies also be perfectly ordered? And can't movie director, if he chooses, be as selective about the details he presents to the viewer...
Nabokov's novel indicates that Herman can't possibly turn life into art, because life is messy and disordered, and it's got to intrude on his perfect vision--a fitting reason for "despair." Nabokov conveys the idea that Herman's plump wife is having an affair with her puerile cousin without the narrator even being aware of it. And when Herman violently proclaims to have found his "perfect double," a tramp named Felix whom he encounters on a path (in a glass funhouse in a movie), we have our nagging doubts that what Herman tells us he sees really...
...Nazis are gaining popularity? Herman's movie consciousness is slightly anachronistic if he's living in 1930, and the film might just as easily have been set in the present time. Perhaps Stoppard presents these Nazis as a counterpoint to Herman: they also dream of an ordered, perfect world; they also must cruelly destroy to attain it; they also, ultimately, find that there is no final solution in a chaotic universe. Or perhaps they are merely placed in the film as an irritant, imposing further on Herman's vision...
...shots, and inspired fooling around with light sources (especially neat when Herman talks with Felix in a dark hotel room, and swings the hanging lamp so that each of them is lit in turn while the other goes dark). The director cleverly conveys the crack-up of Herman's perfect work of art by placing him beside a shattered mirror, which fragments his image...
...cast, well-directed, saves the heavy screenplay from sinking into murky melodrama. Mary Beth Hurt, as the youngest daughter, the one with "all the anguish of an artistic personality without any of the talent," is especially good in her film debut. And Geraldine Page evokes the neurotic woman "too perfect to live in this world" with startling precision...