Word: sensualism
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After all, who but Mourad Saber sleeps with one eye open against the militarist, fascist Zionists? Who else could uncover a Central American conspiracy linking the United Fruit Co. and B'nai B'rith? Who else could resist the sensual, calculating Israeli agent Judith Hertz ("You have the body of a goddess but the soul of a devil")? Who else could interrupt an African chase to lecture streetwalkers in Lourenço Marques on the evils of colonialism...
However, the film gets inextricably bogged down when the mercenaries mix with the peasants. Clavell's characters are dull when they're not in action; the soldiers are grossly sensual and self-serving, and, as is equally realistic, the peasants are stolid, superstitious folk. But Clavell remains outside them: the only characters he feels comfortable with are those of Caine and Sharif, the former having the remaining good lines. (All-suffering Sharif complains bitterly that one of his favorite country maidens is one of a group picked to whore for the soldiers in exchange for protection. Says Caine: "Three months...
...involves such diverse equipment as a folded bath towel, a razor, a hot brick, and dexterous fingers, but the result is so gratifying that the time spent duplicating the mind-boggling Origami dough-folding patterns required pays itself off in spades. What is more, there are few smells more sensual than a kitchen redolent of warm yeast, few sounds more lewd than a gasping piece of pressed dough, few instincts more carnal than those aroused between a cook and his fetal loaf...
That first and greatest of Utopian thinkers, Plato, banned most poets from his Republic because they exalt emotion over reason. Even so cheerful a philosopher as Sir Thomas More (who invented the name Utopia, which is Greek for no place) argued that all sensual pleasures should be pursued only for the sake of health. Other Utopians were equally antiseptic. In The City of the Sun, by the 17th century writer Tommaso Campanella, no woman was permitted to have sexual intercourse until she was 19; a man had to wait until he was 21-or longer, if he happened...
...listen without letting motion spill out of their bodies, without clapping and flashing their hands in the air and dancing. "The great thing about the Dead." explained one disciple, "is . . . like, you can have these wicked cosmic thoughts and dance at the same time. Really spiritual and really sensual...