“Whatever is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.” –Friedrich Nietzsche Adapted from the eponymous 2003 novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin is as stylized and artful as it is inadequate and muddled. The compelling story of the book, about a mother’s experiences with her serial-killer-to-be psychopathic son, undergoes in the film a diffusing of its chronology through the mother’s wounded and burdensome memory. This takes on a tour of Kevin’s upbringing the often addled and sobered viewer, who might feel (as I did) that the spiritless agony of the failed motherhood of Tilda Swinton’s Eva Khatchadourian was in need of more dimensions, and other…
-
-
How well do the members of a family really know one another? A Sunday in the Country seeks to dredge up from a distant, indistinct, but halcyon past the feelings and memories of one family convening for a day outside Paris toward the end of the summer of 1912, with the far-off rumble of thunder as the uncertainty of the First World War billows like a menace. It is a quiet film that is all the more intense for its quietness, carrying with it the heaviness of the past as it contrasts with the delightful but uncommunicative family dynamics that leave so much unspoken, and that have produced years of…
-
“What does marble think when it’s being sculpted? It thinks, ‘I am struck, insulted, ruined, lost.’ Life is sculpting me. Let it finish its work.” The ancient myth of the spouses Orpheus and Eurydice has a time-honored and immemorial place in the arts, in literature, and during the twentieth century in the cinema, where Jean Cocteau put to use his pullulating and vibrantly artistic mind to make Orpheus, one of his greatest films. This is a dreamland that adheres to its own logic and makes for itself a playground of the mind, heavy with symbolism and mythological parallels. It is also a great entertainment. With his heavy-browed and smoldering good…
-
As a finely stylized Japanese film of the Jidaigeki genre, a period piece like so many of its samurai brethren, The Ballad of Narayama stands out nonetheless as an early amalgam of the theater and the cinema. It is an artful filming of the eponymous novella by the Japanese writer Shichirô Fukazawa, itself adapted from the Japanese legend of the practice of what is called obasute, the ritual killing of the elderly, whose offspring take them to a mountaintop or a desolate place where they can pine away. Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita and released in 1958, The Ballad of Narayama combines stark colors and the simplicity of the legend with…
