Word: stepsons
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Interlarded with the bouts between stepfather and stepson are a variety of clumsily contrived flashbacks covering every conceivable area of Jaimie's early development, from parental arguments to toilet training. None of this succeeds in making the hysterically melodramatic conclusions any more convincing. There are, for all this, good performances by Hackett and Jacoby, and a couple of nice, edgy encounters between Jaimie and Peter, most notably one in which they meet for the first time. "Please don't tell me I'm old for my age," Jaimie wearily replies to a bit of elementary flattery. Peter...
...comes at the resolution of the film's main action. A distinguished middle-aged lawyer is unable to consummate his second marriage to a skittish child-wife--who has meanwhile fallen in love with the lawyer's church-studying stepson. At a house party which the three other love pairs attend also, the wife and the stepson, by a variety of plot and thematic clevernesses, end up in the same bed. The young couple make their exit in the lawyer's carriage, while he looks on and does nothing. The wife's virginal white veil flutters to the ground...
...women characters. It seems clear that for the author they are England. One is a tough elderly widow, Maybel Layton, who has foreseen the end of British India for years and feels that it is richly deserved. The second is Mildred, the wife of Colonel Layton, Maybel's stepson. The third is the book's major figure, a retired mission schoolteacher named Barbie Batchelor. She is a good, decent person, not very bright, and downright foolish about matters of practicality and self-interest. For 40 years she has tried to bring little Indian schoolchildren to Jesus...
Sorry, French wonks and sports fans. The movie concerns a lady who takes one too many lovers, the fatal lover her stepson. That plot may be the plot of La Curee. But Vadim's treatment of the lady is highly un-Zolaesque. He doesn't condemn her as an unfortunate being who, because she slipped off the straight and narrow, can only slither around miserably. His treatment isn't an indictment. It's a celebration...
...energies to it. She spends hours exercising, massaging, creaming, bathing, costuming. Vadim follows Miss Fonda with witty conscientiousness through these rites. But her soul is in her pursuit, and the director shows that without joking. At one point she tries to drown herself because she fears the stepson (Peter McEnery) has given her up. She rescues herself at the last moment and lies fur-coated on the stones. Water drips and glistens on the fur. The image is of an animal at once sleek and suffering...