Word: schlondorffs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tugging the viewer through the streets and salons of la Belle Epoque Paris, Schlondorff offers less a version of Proust than a pictorial comment on him. For Proust the heavily draped and cluttered rooms, the constraints of clothing, language, manners and social ritual were familiar givens, matters for exquisitely observed, morally neutral description. For Schlondorff they are a malevolent astonishment. If there is a rational explanation for the obsessive, socially destructive love Charles Swann (Jeremy Irons) feels for the courtesan Odette de Crecy (Ornella Muti), it is to be found in these oppressive surroundings, where the very air breathes...
Herzog's compatriots, gimlet-eyed burghers such as Volker Schlondorff, Wim Wenders and the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, made their mark by refracting the cynical spirit of postwar Germany through a lens as hip as the new Hollywood's. Herzog renounces the rubble and babble of his homeland; none of his nine fiction features is wholly set there. Instead, he is drawn to legends and nightmares. In Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1973), a Spanish officer of the 16th century dreams of conquering South America and ends up alone on a raft, blithe and demented, lording it over...
...boring. Hardened to atrocity along with the protagonist, the viewer is forced to become amoral in order to empathize. Nothing is less satisfying. The film attaches no guilt to apathy, creating a loss of sensation without sentiment for the loss. In providing the emotional exercise for the audience, Schlondorff's fatalistic approach to indifference falls flat...
...passageway. Actually, they are dragging themselves along the carpeted floor of her mansion into the bedroom where they will fiddle as Beirut burns. There is no suspense, no tension in this film only the sustained drone of suppressed angst. Circle of Deceit lacks the mythic color and intensity of Schlondorff's best-known film The Tin Drum. Where the bizarre fantasy of The Tin Drum terrifies and disgusts, the efficient realism of Circle of Deceit fades into ennui. Both movies bear Schlondorff's unmistakable brass-knuckle touch in the scenes of gore and brutishly cold sex, which he portrays with...
Maybe it is impossible to build a film on three adjectives: barbaric, mystical, bored. But if Schlondorff had kept those words in mind as he guided his camera over the russet rooftops of Old Danzig, he might have crafted a film that captured the anguish of the 20th Century as well as Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum...