Word: vagrant
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...stumbles through the autumn landscape--"the prairie smelled of sage and of the dampness held in the earth"--he goes back in memory to his boyhood days of picking apples, his teenage courtship of Rachel, his service in Italy during World War II. Though the narrative is as vagrant as Snow Falling on Cedars was rooted, Guterson's gift for spinning atmospheric spells has not deserted him, and moment after moment flashes into life with the quick vividness of a photograph: the men in war going out "in mattress covers sewn into snow tunics and in creepers made of tightly...
...cliches into the heart of the performances. Here you find Paquin lending a tough intelligence to Alison's confusions; and Lane so all-American gorgeous she needn't act to be the center of every shot. She does act, though, and nicely. She locates Pearl's yearning in vagrant sighs and in sidelong glances at the big world exploding, outside her small one, into sex, drugs and eternal adolescence...
Besides, working on the rough edge of nature offers its vagrant epiphanies. "One day," Chen recalls, "it started raining. We got on the bus, and everyone was so tired, they dozed off. Except for me; I'm an insomniac. I was listening to Rachmaninoff and staring out the window. The black clouds were rolling, but at the end of the horizon a strip of blue showed up, then a rainbow. It was very intense--strong and beautiful, like a gate to heaven. I woke everybody up, and we got it in the movie. So seldom do you see beauty face...
...entire cast does fine work, but Pfeiffer is a treasure. She calibrates each nuance of loss without seeming calculating. She makes Beth sensible and alive, as understandable as that nice woman next door whose sobs wake you in the night to remind you that we are all one vagrant step from heartbreak...
...into their own hands. The film, directed by Alain Berliner from an original script by Chris vander Stappen, has the scheme of a socially fretful TV movie. Yet at heart, Ma Vie en Rose is a delightful comedy, both in its buoyant dream sequences and in Ludo's vagrant, clumsy stabs at embryonic machismo. Staring at himself in the mirror, he shoots off an imaginary gun, just like the other kids, and--he's really trying--adjusts his crotch...