Word: tormentor
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...strips and contorts her, plies her, woos her, drives her to boredom, exasperation, tears. He is, in last week's favorite phrase, her mentor and tormentor. What the aging artist Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) does to his young model, Marianne (Emmanuelle Beart), as she poses for his first painting in years, is a disinterested kind of sexual harassment for art's sake. These sittings, a seduction on canvas, fill more than half of Jacques Rivette's four-hour La Belle Noiseuse. The phrase is loosely translated as "the beautiful nut case," but Frenhofer, not Marianne, is the genial lunatic...
...would ever have imagined that kiss? There on Iraqi TV was Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, whose people have been betrayed, gassed, shot and forced into exile by Saddam Hussein, reaching out to the tormentor himself. There was Saddam, who once said he would run a sword through the rebellious Talabani before permitting him to return to Iraq, pressing his lips against the cheek of the Kurdish representative. It was enough to make even the most cynical Middle East watcher blink hard and move closer...
...caption and sequence of photographs clearly imply that I was attempting to warp the psyche of the youthful audience member for whom I was playing. You have portrayed me as a terrorizer of children; in specific, a malicious tormentor of little boys. Thanks to your picture, community members spit on me as they pass and parents warn their children away from...
...considered opinion. He dances past the offender, arms flapping, and plants the lance. "Eastie, Eastie," he rasps, in a voice that is part James Cagney, part Peter Lorre, part Bethlehem, Pa., "didja get someone else to take your College Boards for ya? Didja?" Eastwick stands transfixed, while his tormentor teeters (Could this be?) on the edge of tears. Then Peter J. (Pete) Carril, all 5 ft. 6 1/2 in. of him, winks and permits himself a tiny, sly smile. Eastwick will think twice about attempting that kind of pass again. Carril is sure of that, at least as sure...
...other Safire foils remain oddly charmed by their tormentor. Bert Lance has become a friend, even though Safire won his 1978 Pulitzer for exposing the freewheeling banking practices that led to the resignation of Jimmy Carter's budget director. Charles Wick, the Reagan-era head of the U.S.I.A. and a frequent Safire target, gushes, "There's no way you can dislike the guy. I admire him so much." Perhaps no journalistic jousting caused the anguish of the Iran-contra rift with the late CIA director William Casey, whose 1966 congressional campaign Safire managed. Critical columns led to angry phone calls...