Word: vitas
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...Grand Bouffe 4:40, 9:40; La Doice Vita...
Mastroianni. Marcello Mastroianni always seems the epitome of the bourgeois Italian, a man who has the time and the interest to cultivate the appearance of urbanity for its own sake. Even when, as in La Dolce Vita, he had an aloof, introspective, critical streak as an observer of society, he was still getting himself involved in meaningless ego-enhancing encounters with Italian starlets. To me, the hedonistic pilot he played in The Grand Bouffe seemed the perfect role...
...first the marriage seemed to break apart--Vita fled to France with her lover and Harold resorted to the British Navy to bring her back. But on the basis of mutual tolerance, the two settled down to a marriage their son describes as idyllic, whose sine qua non was the absolute freedom of both partners to enjoy sexual adventures with other men and women. Even when their outside infatuations were deepest, they couldn't think of each other merely as "friends;" of course they could not think of each other as lovers; they could only be described as husband...
Aside from her role as Vita's lover, Virginia Woolf is an important figure in Portrait of a Marriage because she came very close to embarking on a marriage exactly like the Nicolsons'. She considered, and at one point accepted, an offer of marriage from Lytton Strachey, which would have produced precisely the same sexual orientation. In the end Lytton chickened out, but the episode proves that this kind of marriage is not as irrelevant an accident as it might seem, but an increasingly major alternative to the problems that all the sex researchers of the sixties have done little...
...hostile reader could easily see the Nicolson marriage as a sham. Two wealthy, upper-class homosexuals make the mistake of marrying and then spend the next half-century trying to keep up appearances. Judgment hinges on an evaluation of Vita's sincerity and the objectivity of her son. If they deluded themselves, this Portrait of a Marriage is worthless. Most of the other books produced by the family are more glib and polished--but whether or not they will be remembered depends on the long-run verdict on the free, civilized form of marriage these two proper Britons pioneered. Whether...