Word: pursewarden
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...Also effective are the contrasts brought out in the cross-cutting between the pub and the church, and between the slum mines and the sunny green fields. But the effective in American film making is not without its drawbacks and so recalls the words of Lawrence Durrell's Pursewarden: "The effective in art is what rapes the emotion of your audience without nourishing its values." The trouble with most American "realism" in the cinema is that it is usually achieved by authenticity and powerful, clever devices rather than by suggestion...
Ready? In the late 1930s, Justine (Anouk Aimée), the sensual wife of an Egyptian banker named Nessim (John Vernon), had been yearning after the aloof British diplomat Pursewarden (Dirk Bogarde), although she had to content herself with the favors of Darley (Michael York), a young writer and lover of a belly dancer named Melissa (Anna Karina). Suddenly Justine and Nessim are revealed as Coptic Christians involved in smuggling guns to Palestine so that the Jews can fight the British. Pursewarden, who knows of their treachery, keeps silent, apparently out of love for Justine. Melissa meanwhile goes...
...including Pittakos (who sends her a gold bracelet from Athens, still attached to a severed arm, in memory of their affair). Before the first act is over she has seduced Pittakos' twin brother Phaon, the diver who recovers the tablets from the lost city. Like his Novelist Pursewarden in the Quartet, Durrell is a superb ironist, and the play's central theme-that man is responsible for his world as immutably as he is its victim-turns on the fact that Sappho herself has forced the destiny of Lesbos by deceitfully assuming the voice of the island...
Here again are Durrell's ravening women: handsome, black-browed Justine, a nymphomaniac with a neurotic need of intrigue; large-eyed, blonde Clea, who, when stripped, looks as "naked and slender as an Easter lily"; and blind Liza, still dotty with love for her suicide brother Pursewarden. Here, too, are his strangely ineffectual men: Nessim, the Coptic millionaire, in trouble both with his wife Justine and the British government; Dr. Balthazar, the homosexual cabalist; Mountolive, the stiff-necked British ambassador; and Darley, the Irish schoolteacher, who tries to put together the carnal jigsaw puzzle of his friends...
...variously interpreted by different participants. In Justine, Purse-warden's suicide is attributed to acedia, or boredom with life; Balthazar suggests that the suicide was caused by his failure as an artist; in Mountolive, the motive becomes purely political; and now in Clea, it seems established that Pursewarden took his life in an ironic expiation of his incestuous love for his blind sister. Durrell's point: "Truth is what most contradicts itself...