Word: rossner
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...Hollywood Wives, Collins (1 last week) 2. Christine, King (2) 3. The Seduction of Peter S., Sanders (3) 4. August, Rossner (4) 5. Who Killed the Robins Family?, Adler and Chastain 6. White Gold Wielder, Donaldson (6) 1. The Name of the Rose, Eco (8) 8. Godplayer, Cook (5) 9. The Little Drummer Girl, Le Carré (7) 10. Decision, Drury...
AUGUST by Judith Rossner...
...novel, Judith Rossner (Looking for Mr. Goodbar) returns to a favorite theme: the frantic search for emotional connection. The New York City landscape of August is littered with suicides, failed marriages, estranged children and an assortment of ambivalent sexual identities. The one successful relationship is built between two women: Dawn Henley, 18 at the outset, an orphaned college student, and Dr. Lulu Shinefeld, her fortyish psychoanalyst. In classic Freudian fashion, the patient seeks a surrogate parent. The analyst, a divorcee and failed mother, comes to view her patient as a surrogate daughter. Each woman uses the analytic relationship to relive...
...route, Rossner tosses off a number of saline one-liners ("Women looked at a gray-haired man and saw Father; men looked at a gray-haired woman and ran from death"). But August has two profound flaws. The narrative, which starts out like a detective story, is a tease: Dawn never arrives at a stunning moment of self-realization; instead, the treatment just winds down haphazardly and stops. Worse, Rossner cannot seem to decide what kind of book she is writing. At moments she appears to strive for the heartfelt tone of Judith Guest in Ordinary People; a few sentences...
...vilification unloaded upon her by Dunn's succession of one-night lovers. Tuesday Weld provides an unmemorable contrast to Keaton as Dunn's capricious older sister Katherine, relying too heavily on the character's caricaturish whackiness to carry her through the part. Richard Brooks' direction and adaptation of Judith Rossner's best-selling novel is sufficiently slick to draw crowds to the box office, but the film can be filed as another victim to the typical super-ficiality of American movies. Sharp witticisms and flashy techniques keep the movie's pace upbeat, while Brooks neglects Dunn's broader significance...