Word: scene
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After Harvard severed its ties to the nine all-male final clubs in 1984, punching season returned, the parties continued, and for the most part the debate over the clubs seemed to have reached a settlement. Until Lisa J. Schkolnick '88 came on the scene...
...imaginary figures, who burst in accompanied by golden light and birdsong, are beautiful, adoring, suave, rich and effortlessly brilliant -- a shallow bourgeois fantasy of upper-class life, disturbing not only because the wife yearns for this escape but because she fills it with such empty pretense. In one harrowing scene, she gradually loses the / conviction that these are her fantasies and comes to fear that she is theirs. Ayckbourn and Meadow are powerfully assisted by Channing, a 1985 Tony winner, who handles her bravura role with understatement. Poignant and persuasive, hers is the performance of the New York season...
THERE are moments, however, when Lee's originality and ability shine through. One example is a sex scene between Julian and Jane that is syncopated with a series of blackouts and music. It has a spooky quality and a charged, almost perverse sexuality...
...addition to airing some touchy intra-racial conflicts, the movie has a good deal of nasty, misogynistic business. Besides the several exaggerated catfights there's an especially disturbing scene where Jane is forced to have sex with Half-Pint, the runt of the Gamma pledges (played unremarkably by Lee himself) as part of his initiation. All the audience has in the way of explanation for this type of slanted portrayal (Lee even stoops to the tired fat-women-are-funny gag) is the film's surreal epilogue contained in the last sequence...
...ambivalence about his message is particularly visible in this final scene which serves as a sort of bizarre postscript. Dap runs into the center of campus yelling "Wake up!" and inexplicably, the major factions come together. Presumably, Lee is instructing his audience to rise above the prejudice, infighting and blindness portrayed in the film. But it's a copout. Lee is trying to distance himself from the harshness of the world he has depicted. But the audience has been bombarded with animosity and anger for two relentless hours. Lee's attempt to depict some sort of reconciliation is too little...