Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...would seem unlikely that trivial questions such as these--at least they seem trivial within the realm of modern life--would be enough to sustain the film. But somehow, they do. Director James Ivory is so successful at creating the atmosphere of upper-class Victorian England that the viewer never challenges the mores of Edwardian society. A kiss, so commonplace today, is presented as the logical grounds upon which one should decide on one's life mate...
...setting, at first, seems fabricated solely for farce. The place is London, the year is 1880; high Victorian earnestness rules the day, and people with funny names start assembling onstage. Waldo Chatterway, a society gossip who has spent the past 25 years cultivating the "tall poppies" of Continental royalty, decides to move back to his native London for good. He visits his longtime friend Severus Egg, "the last of the romantic poets," who retains a malicious wit and the conviction, in his mid-70s, that "I have survived into the era of the goody-goodies." Egg, naturally, has a black...
...motion an exquisite comedy of errors. Clandestine meetings become necessary, with the following results: the painter, Timothy Lupton, falls in love with Maudie, while her mother decides that this dashed handsome young bohemian's attentions are directed at her. Added to this mix-up are cameo appearances by Victorian notables like Walter Pater, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Huxley. But beneath this sparkling surface roil undercurrents of genuine pain. Nettleship, a figure of fun in all his balding, pedantic outward manifestations, knows himself well enough to realize that he has botched his life and that the gloom he suffered...
...narrative is beguiling in the extreme. Imprisoned in "a pampered life," her own survival hanging on her ability to obey and reproduce, she surreptitiously reveals the play of intelligence and curiosity that has been forbidden to her sex. She has a keen eye for daily routines in the old Victorian house, located in what was apparently once Cambridge, Mass. She notes the costume she must wear, a Handmaid's uniform, when she is allowed to go out shopping: "Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us. The skirt is ankle-length, full...
Anticipation crackled in the air as nearly 500 human rights activists, journalists and other spectators crowded into a Victorian-style courtroom in downtown Buenos Aires. For eight months the chamber had resounded with the chilling testimony of 833 witnesses as they recounted tales of murder, torture and abductions in the night committed against suspected subversives during six years of military rule from 1976 to 1982. But a heavy silence fell over the room as six appeals-court judges filed in last week to deliver their verdict on the nine military leaders who had been charged with responsibility for what Argentines...