Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...century elegance of Wilbur's heroic couplets is totally out of place and soon becomes tiresome droning. Add to this a genuinely ugly set that is half a caricature of art deco and half a clumsy imitation of seventies Manhattan townhouse elegance. Pile on costumes that range from late Victorian decadent fopperty to Gatsby-esque knickers and then to late sixties hippy uniforms. This confusion of era and sensibilities obscures the director's intent, if indeed he ever...
...these hung-up aristocrats fled to the cities and found the streets lined with mattresses. Polish director Walerian Borowczyk's film leers away at one of them, the young Ewa, as the world of decadent prewar Europe opens her eyes. Story of Sin tells the tale of a Victorian miss gone va-va-va-voom...
...this slightly preposterous histriography descend to boffo-ness. With a less surrealistic touch Borowczyk maintains the same tenor of classy send-up that Bunuel attained throughout most of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Dissected a bit more, the whole business might be interpreted as a restless and repressed Victorian fantasy. But let's refrain from spoiling with pretentious theories a film that makes such good fun of its own pretentious style. Call Story of Sin a paean to romanticism in reverse. And take with a grain of salt its subject matter: the exquisite fruitness...
Oscar Wild's masterpiece is half-satire and all farce. Its humor is partly topical, rooted in the decadence of the late Victorian aristocracy and gentry. But its farcical underpinnings allow it to date unusually well. Wilde's dialogue abounds in inversion and paradox, in the replacement of the weighty with the insubstantial. His characters talk nonsense with a straight face and flout verbal conventions while remaining always socially correct...
Algernon's clipped witticisms and Miss Prism's agonized confrontation with her own carelessness are the two high points of this production. But its real star is Joe Mobilia's sets, whose every detail--from the porcelain tea service to the yellow silk upholstered sofa--elegantly evokes late victorian decadence...