Word: tanners
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...Dalloway and Pride and Prejudice similar works because each portrays a female as she relates to the people around her. Just as the stylistic innovations of Virginia Woolf's study make it part of a different century and a different sensibility from Jane Austen's traditional novel, so Tanner's film, with its ubiquitous symbolism and its disruption of the conventional rules of narrative, occupies a cinematic universe distinct from Bergman's. Scenes from a Marriage is a classical work. It derives its dramatic power from the potency of its dialogue, the emotive force of its actors, and the austerity...
...film, like all events, takes place at a particular time in a particular place," we are prepared for a violation of the usual rules of narrative. To say that Paul and Adriana's relationship "develops" as it would, say, in a nineteenth-century English novel, would be to misrepresent Tanner's technique, which, with its series of furtive, sometimes unconnected glimpses into their lives, attempts to reproduce on film the texture of everyday life. Just as affairs in reality are a series of fits and starts, with little coherence while they are experienced, so Paul and Adriana's passion...
Besides this seemingly more "faithful" representation of reality. Tanner uses a disjunctive montage--scenes begin and end arbitrarily--that endows trivial gestures and cursory phrases with a heightened significance. Paul, driving his car along a country road after visiting Adriana, pulls into a dirt lane, pushes back his seat, rolls up the window, and closes his eyes to go to sleep--then another date announcing a new day flashes on the screen. Adriana sits alone nude in her drab room, cooking some broth on her hot plate; she gets up from her chair and slips into a robe; she returns...
...conventions of ordered narrative development provides a ready vehicle for a director eager to present a vision of a bleak, alpine world where individuals try unsuccessfully to break the shell that surrounds them. However, the automatic poignancy it confers on detail lends itself to over-simplification of character that Tanner is unable to resist. When reinforced with an often facile symbolism, these nuances of individual behavior cement the stereotyping of sexual roles that makes The Middle of the World far inferior to Scenes from a Marriage in its dissection of a couple's relationship. Visual snatches of Paul caressing Adriana...
...TANNER must insist on formulating such pat sexual roles for his lead characters, it would be, one would hope, for the purpose of making some broader statement about why such behavior is so typical of men and women in society. But his adherence to a visual world where details reign supreme and where events occur without apparent consequences not only divests Paul and Adriana of any real inner complexity; it also undercuts whatever representativeness they might have by fragmentating their relations with society into symbols of isolation and solitude. Paul's eventual defeat in the election is merely an incidental...