Mishandled grievously . . . amalgam . . . Eisenstein's Old and New or Renoir's Grand Illusion . . . shades into a meditation on the transcience of not so much life as existence . . . an ideologically ambivalent dystopia.
Less a devil than a walking conumdrum . . . Jenny Agutter (The Eagle Has Landed, Equus) . . . the muted rhetoric of naturalism . . . supple zooms, pans, and tracking shots . . . fascination with the tonalities of light . . . serious new offering . . . the Church is a curious and pervasive target here . . . oddly comic pathos . . . misanthropy as bold social criticism . . . unsentimentally asserts that self-deception and paranoia are the accoutrements of survival . . . a dispassionate mimicry . . . individual selfhood.
Or so it says.
Illustration of how superfluous . . . delineate its entrenchment . . . shallow formulas . . . don't add up . . . misleads in suggesting a systematic development of story and theme . . . sleekly condescending . . . betrayed by the stage production . . . beer belly . . . awkwardly contrived . . . degraded by stupid, shabby filmmaking . . . exaggerated privatism.
A reason is not so easy to pin down . . . cannot have what it acutally needs . . . wild Brazilian crooks . . . curdled hatred and hysterical vengeance . . . symbolic castrator . . . tends to submerge the archaic . . . destroys the viewer's confidence . . . something has been demonstrated rather than grasped, felt, and conveyed.
Mockery is still propoganda.
Copyright © 1985,1995 by Kelvin Thompson
All Rights Reserved
(Updated July 20, 1995.)