Word: pinter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
TIME MARCHES ON--and, in Harold Pinter's world, sometimes retreats. Pinter, after the fashion of most absurdist playwrights, delights in distorting and playing with time. And John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel of time--a modern narrator looking through a modern window at a Victorian story...
...when director Kerel Reisz decided to go ahead with the filming of French Lieutenant's Woman, he looked to Pinter for a translation. The challenge for the scriptwriter came in maintaining the mood and contrasts of the Fowles book without clumsily injecting a modern narrator. The choice of Pinter was well-made, for he transforms the book-within-a-book into a film-within-a-film with a minimum of messiness. His screenplay respects the intent of the original novel, whose 20th-century structure of author's conceits and devices framed a haunting story of 19th-century romance and passion...
Directed by Karel Reisz; Screenplay by Harold Pinter...
...then, in the final modern scene, Mike's film world falls to pieces. This is the Pinter-Reisz equivalent of Fowles' unhappy ending: a "wrap party" to celebrate the film's completion. Mike cannot bear the prospect of losing Anna. Where can she be? She is in the room where the final period sequence was shot, examining herself in one of Sarah's mirrors. But Anna engages in no searching of soul or image-just a glance and a primp and she's off. Mike reaches the room as the car motor...
...John Fowles who suggested that the film's final line of dialogue be "Sarah!" He deserves to share credit with Pinter and Reisz for assembling this multilayered meditation on the blurring lines that connect actor, character and audience. But the creation might have remained stillborn without the contribution of Meryl Streep. This Sarah, this Anna, this warring family of sirens demands an incandescent star. With this performance, Streep proves she is both. Virgin, whore, woman, actress, she provides the happy ending to The French Lieutenant's Woman and new life to a cinema starved for shining stars...