Word: starke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Production Designer Joe Alves was dispatched to the East to find a location for the fictional village of Amity. The Hamptons were considered and rejected as "too opulent" before Alves, en route to Nantucket, took a ferry to Martha's Vineyard instead. The island had handsome houses and stark, scrub-pine shore vistas. It boasted a handy harbor with the sort of 180° view of the horizon, all uninterrupted, that Spielberg was looking for. Alves thought the Vineyard was perfect for Jaws. The residents, however, were not so sure...
...time warp intervenes between 20th century Paris and Spain. The only swinging Carmen Ordóñez de Rivera, 21, does is from the ropes in her father's bullring. Then her stark beauty sparks into a dazzling smile, she starts to laugh and becomes a kid on a spree. Normally, Carmen, the elder daughter of one of Spain's greatest matadors, Antonio Ordóñez, is as poised as an infanta. Descended on both sides from bullfighters, she is an elegant young woman with a simpler joie de vivre than her contemporaries in such racy cities...
...little more imagination on Schlesinger's part. He might have forsaken the gaudy, lush colors with which he chose to evoke Hollywood for something simpler, more barren, might even have filmed it in black and white, thereby allowing his excellent cast to draw their weird, surrcal characters against a stark background instead of having them clash confusingly with their environment. He would have done well to have completely eliminated Tod and had more confidence in his own cinematographic eye to paint the spectacle...
...lapse into romanticism and self-indulgence which threatens to mar the film's authenticity, however, is avoided by the stark contrast of the black and white sequences. The intercutting of past as color and present as black and white functions as a sort of Brechtian alienation effect, distancing the viewer from the action in order to make him consider its implications. The black and white sequences, both in form and content, pose the question of the occupation's meaning for Frenchmen today. The dull crowds of people, the dark buildings, the depressing film studio--mundane scenes from the present--undercut...
...indeed of the whole fantasy of escape into aristocratic elegance which comprises the central theme of the film, is that this is precisely the sort of ambivalent and delusory self-consciousness we might expect a woman in her situation to have: the easiest exit from the drudgery and stark misery of factory and tenement is assimilation into the elite through physical beauty and seductive charm, as the heroines of mass culture from Cinderella to Marilyn Monroe have discovered. Had De Sica treated the contradictions in Clara's self-awareness with the sardonic tone whose subtle pinpricks enabled Flaubert to deflate...