Word: soft
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Trust Your Commanders. When the military rose up against Leftist Joao Goulart last year, it was Costa e Silva who was responsible for putting Castello Branco in the presidential palace. Since then, he has been a buffer between the soft-lining President and the linha dura (hardline) officers, who want ironhanded "revolutionary government." Last month, after anti-government candidates won gubernatorial elections in the key states of Minas Gerais and Guanabara, Rio's powerful First Army was on the verge of revolt-until Costa e Silva stepped in. "You must trust your commanders," he told the officers. "They...
...peers at the sky. A jet swoops upward, catching the wind, in a visual poem to flight. Educational TV? A documentary on aeronautics? No, just a two-minute spot plugging Eastern Airlines' flight to Miami. In any year it would have been a tasteful, artful job of the soft sell, but in this, television's slackest season, the Eastern Airlines commercial looked like a masterwork...
Towards the end of Soft Skin, Pierre must make an extremely essential phone call. Just at that point a silly looking blond captures the phone booth and Pierre waits impatiently while she completes her call. Director Francois Truffaut has chosen a device so obviously contrived that your entire build-up of tension gets stopped in its tracks...
Pierre lies to his wife about Nicole, lies to Nicole about his wife, and lies to himself about his own duplicity. But Truffaut does not want you merely to observe that the man is dishonest. Instead he places you inside Pierre's own "soft skin" with a series of phony devices forcing you to feel the same kind of sharp checks on the plot that Pierre experiences in his life...
...closing shots, when Franca shoots Pierre in a cafe, Truffaut has the spectators almost comically rise en masse to disrupt your sympathies once again. The director of The Soft Skin will not permit you your comfortable catharsis. Rather you must leave the theatre with the deepest feeling of hollowness which is far more painful and--I believe--honest...