Word: rappaccini
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE'S Rappaccini's Daughter, from which Rappaccini was adapted, pushes the American black romance to its limits. A young man entering college takes a room opening onto a courtyard garden. One day he sees an extraordinarily beautiful girl walking among the exotic flowers, and approaches her. Despite her extreme shyness and the warnings of a family friend (a professional rival of the brilliant Dr. Rappaccini), Giovanni wins the love of Beatrice Rappaccini. The garden's flowers are, however, poisonous; Beatrice, having grown up in the garden, lives on them. When Giovanni discovers this he gives her an antidote...
...visual style of Rappaccini thus synthesizes personal emotions, personal development, plot, and thematic development into a single drama. It's the perfect way to put Hawthorne's romance into film. This type of romance, designed to describe personal development through emotional (above all, love) experience, requires its characters' sentiments to seem real and strong so that their actions will feel sufficiently motivated. Edelstein establishes the objectivity, indeed the rule, of his characters' emotional experience. Their actions are completely determined by their emotions, and since these emotions form the world of his film, the entire drama proceeds with a chilling inevitability...