-
The Heiress
What Jessica Chastain conveys with great success in THE HEIRESS is a young woman on the cusp of a change in manners. She is ill-at-ease in the 19th century of calling cards and formal visits, with its peculiar conventions of courtship and parental approbation, but with a certain cluelessness about what will replace it, and…
-
Wuthering Heights
One of the clearer processes of action and reaction in cultural history was that Romanticism reacted against Neo-Classicism, that Naturalism reacted in turn against Romanticism, and that, in a somewhat minor aftershock, Aestheticism recoiled from Naturalism. Amongst the many remarkable things about the new film of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is that it brings the…
-
Trishna
Michael Winterbottom’s TRISHNA is sumptuous. It adapts Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles to a contemporary Indian setting and in the process retains the essential beauty of the tragedy while stripping from it the nostalgia and romanticism to which period filmmaking is prone. The past is everywhere in the images – the colonial edifices, the…
-
The Select
I have always had mixed feelings about the Hemingway ouvre, but The Sun Also Rises has the special virtue of being perfect. It is one of those novels – Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is another – that uses an anecdote involving a small number of characters to distill the essence of an historical moment. So I was…
-
Age of Consent • The Tempest
I came to Norman Lindsay’s witty, wise and wily novel AGE OF CONSENT through the effervescent film of the same name that the great Michael Powell directed in 1969. Some have spotted a connection to Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the plot, which concerns a painter struggling to find inspiration on an isolated Australian isle accompanied…
-
The American • Up in the Air
Seeing THE AMERICAN made me read the book on which it is based. Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman turned out to be a passable thriller that has its moments but pales in comparison to the film. The movie is a taut, perfectly paced and morally ambiguous character study that, by making the central figure…
-
The City of Your Final Destination
THE CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION is the first Merchant Ivory film to be released without the involvement of the late Ismail Merchant. Cinephiles have not always favored the determinedly literary and so, the argument goes, un-cinematic Merchant-Ivory franchise (James Ivory being its other half), but I have usually found the bookish pace engrossing and…