Word: waitressing
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...just finished her sixth movie in the past two years, and last week she began work on her seventh, Alfred Hitchcock's Deceit. She has not sought out safe, sympathetic parts. She has played the teasing Faye Greener in The Day of the Locust, the honky-tonk waitress Rayette Dipesto in Five Easy Pieces, the low-down and libidinous Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby, and the victimized Monkey in Portnoy's Complaint. Right now she is within hailing distance of being what she calls "a first-rank star...
...with all of his bourgeois respectability, smoothly articulating his planned platitudes to a carefully selected, receptive audience. Midway through his speech the moderator calls for a break so that the listeners can refresh themselves with mugs of beer--on the house, of course. From behind the counter emerges a waitress carrying a tray of refreshments, and a striking entrance it is: tall and slender, with long black hair and deep Italian eyes, she creates an inevitable stir, an Aphrodite rising in a sea of mediocrity. The next day the engineer returns to the cafe, and, after obtaining the waitress...
Unfortunately, the movement of Alain Tanner's direction mirrors the course of his protagonist's development. As Paul begins to miss appointments, muff speeches, and generally lose interest in his own campaign, as he becomes involved with the waitress, Adriana (Olimpia Carlisi). The Middle of the World loses its promised dialectical interweaving of the social with the personal, collapsing into a solipsistic world of passion and despair. The turning point, both in Paul's fortunes as well as the potential of the film, occurs one evening when Paul and Adriana dine in a local restaurant named appropriately enough, the Middle...
...PAUL and Adriana leave the restaurant and reach the engineer's flashy red sportscar, the waitress, until now aloof, looks her suitor in the eye and says in a low, seductive voice. "And now I want to show you the real middle of the world." The scene cuts to her bedroom, where the two quickly doff their inhibitions and their clothes and slip under the sheets, quickly reaching the first of the many climaxes that shape their deepening affair...
...political issues and to sell Paul as a Mr. Clean figure: Adriana's difficulty in keeping her customers' hands off her backside; her mysterious departure from her working-class neighborhood in Italy--the very relations that lend this affair between a married middle-class engineer and a lower-class waitress more than merely psychological significance become only ponderous ornaments adorning a theme we've seen handled too many times in the past...