Word: psychodrama
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Betrayal is minimalist self-conscious pseudo-drama at its most lean and mean, a love triangle chopped up, robbed of emotional content, shorn of traditional character relationships, and pasted together in reverse order. What remains (a lot) is 90 minutes of ersatz psychodrama that flip-flops the protagonists' emotions, the concept of the dramatic narrative, and traditional notions of romance, nostalgia, friendship and adultery...
...Then she discovers the power of her own erotic impulse. Overnight, Daddy's little girl is a slut in Mama's eyes, and the family falls into convulsions of jealousy and hatred. Like the off-Hollywood films of John Cassavetes, A Nos Amours is less drama than psychodrama; it wears its artlessness as a badge of intrepid truth-telling. Bonnaire's artlessness though, marks her as an exotic found object and a genuine movie find...
...demands of celebrity: Tell us all, tell us the worst, tell us more than we think we want to know. Although Quentin, the play's protagonist, is a lawyer, and Maggie, his second wife, is a pop singer, the veils quickly fall. Fiction is revealed as self-pitying psychodrama, and Miller's descent into himself risks being taken as a wallow in metaphysical sleaze...
...that is the first song since Billie Jean to reach the top slots simultaneously on the pop, black and dance charts. Purple Rain had already sold nearly 2.5 million copies before the movie was released last Friday. This is serious business. So is the movie, a short-circuited psychodrama that grafts snazzy performance footage onto the fictive fever chart of an angst-ridden musician called The Kid and played by Prince himself. The movie has been pulling down real tub-thumper reviews, the sort of hot-seat hype that gives some indication of the way Prince can generate fever...
Although the dichotomy of psychodrama and mystery thriller splinters its focus and perhaps detracts from the overall effect of the novel. Piercy, at times, achieves quite a bit with both strands. For those who are fans of her candidly graphic powerful poetry, Piercy's newest fiction may be a slight disappointment. But she remains a serious novelist whose passion for the truth about her characters cannot be ignored...