Two men working in a business for violin restoration play squash together and dine together at a local bistro, but they otherwise keep to themselves—at least the voiceover, heard once in the beginning of the story, would have us believe that this is the case. Uttered by the laconic and emotionless Stéphane, this voiceover reveals more than anything else in the story the attitudes and the personality of this vaguely ascetic man. A master craftsman of all things violin, Stéphane works in the shop at the back of their workplace with the stolid patience of a visionary, someone so deeply immersed in his work that the outside world disintegrates as…
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Setting the cinematic standard for an adaptation of a play by William Shakespeare, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet received accolades aplenty when it was released in the fall of 1968. It seemed to have the hallmarks of a faithful literary adaptation from the beloved Bard, and its setting in modern Italy, using location shooting as a further stamp of authenticity, was to become the backdrop of the many sumptuous and sensuous scenes that brought Shakespeare to new and vivid life. This was a film of which Shakespeare himself might have been proud, resplendent with a young, vigorous cast, and for many of them it was the beginning of a glorious…
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The meeting of Bob and Charlotte is the meeting of two people, straying, despondent, groping in the desert of an existence, and disoriented by the foreignness of a culture emphasizing that they are adrift. Tokyo as the setting of the story brings out the loneliness of Bob and Charlotte, a swirling storm distilling its center, which is both the characters and the hotel refuge above the city; accentuating their loneliness and ennui, the culture shock of the characters lays bare what many travelers have experienced: that foreign cultures expose the contingency and existential arbitrariness of our own, revealing the hollowness of the unquestioned safeguards of meaning and purpose. Foreign cultures…
