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Wake in Fright
In his great essay On Racine, the French theorist Roland Barthes observed that the most ancient of tragedies arose in the arid and sundrenched landscapes of the Mediterranean, under merciless skies and aside great oceans. It would have been no accident that a sense of cosmic isolation and the exigencies of survival posed a dramatic…
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Sleeping Beauty
I should say that this is not wholesome holiday fare. Julia Leigh‘s SLEEPING BEAUTY is a sort of Australian feminist manifestation of a genre that I associate with French directors such as Catherine Breillat (who has directed a film of the same title) and Jean-Claude Brisseau, which dissects non-normative or perverse sexual behavior in a…