Word: vita
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Caterina (Clayburgh), a recently widowed American opera star, and her androgynous 15-year-old son Joe (Matthew Barry). During the course of a summer singing tour through Italy, the wealthy mother and the spoiled boy carry on a tortured relationship that might well shock the cast of La Dolce Vita. Obscene screaming matches and violent brawls quickly give way to grueling sequences featuring heroin injection and masturbatory sex. The film's dramatic structure is built around the secrets the characters keep from each other: there is more than one Oedipal affair in Luna...
...study at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute. Returning to Italy two years later, he continued writing operas (The Italian Straw Hat), symphonies and chamber works during his next 45 years, but achieved his greatest success scoring such films as Fellini's La Strada (1954), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8½(1963) and Amarcord(1915), as well as Francis Ford Coppola's two Godfather films. Prolific and inventive, Rota often wrote his scores before the director began shooting. Said he: "Music does not need to be hard to understand to be good. It should relax and entertain the audience...
Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson's bestselling immorality tale about his mother's lesbian affairs and his father's homosexual proclivities, schooled American readers in the eccentric love lives of the English aristocracy. Nicolson's mother, Vita Sackville-West, belonged to one of England's most venerable families; Knole, their fabled ancestral home, sheltered the sort of elaborate sexual and emotional transactions fashionable among the Bloomsbury set. But the Victorian era boasted its own dramas of unlikely passion: Vita's mother, Lady Victoria Sackville, was herself the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish dancer...
Pepita, ostensibly a biography of Victoria's mother, offered a devastating portrait of Vita Sackville-West's own mother, a "pure undiluted peasant," whose tantrums made austere Knole echo like some Andalusian marketplace. Victoria, wrote her daughter, was "a powerful dynamo generating nothing," an imperious, high-strung woman given to firing her servants on a whim and more turbulent than Lady Macbeth. "I think perhaps you do not realise," Victoria complained to Lord Kitchener in the midst of World War I, "that we employ five carpenters and four painters and two blacksmiths and two footmen...
...intimacy is nearly matched by their attachment to Rome-where they have spent part of every summer for the past 25 years. "We have no work plans at all right now," says Beauvoir. "We're just enjoying our vacation." As a friend describes the pair's dolce vita, "They're leading a calm life, and trying to make the most of their time-just like any retired couple...