Word: proustians
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Critics and audiences alike have responded with enthusiasm to Follies' stylistic inventiveness. There is less unanimity of feeling about the theme. Some ?including TIME'S T.E. Kalem?found in it Proustian resonances. Some contend that James Goldman, whose screenplay for The Lion in Winter won a 1968 Oscar, has supplied less of a book than a book jacket. For Phyllis, he wrote some pseudo-sophisticated, Manhattanite monologues that are better read than said...
...Last season, the producer-director and composer-lyricist collaborated on Company, which focused a diamond-cutting laser beam on marriage, Manhattan-style. With Follies, Prince and Sondheim, together with Choreographer and Co-Director Michael Bennett, have audaciously staked out some unknown territory. They have put together the first Proustian musical-an act of dramatic creation even more daring than making a Proustian film (see CINEMA...
...such as Karel Reisz (Isadora) and Alain Renais (La Guerre Est Finie) acknowledge their debt to the master in every temporal experiment. Rohmer is no less a disciple, but much less a film maker. His work is sterile in its perfection; it lacks nothing but passion. And without that Proustian quality, all drama, all conflict, however witty or profound, becomes mere talk...
That intelligence can seldom shine through the film. Director Karel Reisz (Morgan!) has found an appropriately Proustian mode in which to tell the story, pouring time forward and then reversing it, like the sand in an hour glass. But he places Isadora, the first natural dancer, on a background of numbing artificiality and casts her opposite a series of unconvincing poseurs and popinjays. The baroque scenario -radically cut from 170 to 131 minutes -is florid without being literate, essentially true to the events, but essentially false to the tragicomic character who made them happen...
Idiosyncratic as Céline's novels are, they nevertheless offer a mosaic of clinically observed poor and pitiable people. Recent French novels, on the other hand, have abjured any attempt to examine man on a Proustian or Balzac -ian scale in favor of esthetic gimcrackery, narrow psychological study and freakish private experiment. As a literary construction, Castle to Castle is equivocal-a hateful papier-mache funfair castle inhabited by real monsters...