louis-16 Reviews

Interview Day (1996 TV Movie)

Humor, irony, and depth

[18 May 2000]

Seemingly unprepossessing as it opens, _Interview Day_ (it was aired under this title by WGBH) gains humor, irony, and depth as it follows the anxious introduction of three young applicants to Cambridge University and the visit to a nursing home of one of the interviewing faculty along with his reluctant father (a retired don). It explores the limits of reach of the family, even the most loving family, as an adolescent or elderly parent moves beyond its power to protect.

As each family approaches this reality the caregivers attempt, sometimes comically, sometimes painfully, always awkwardly, to navigate the transition along with their loved one. Ultimately they realize that they cannot. But this misses the humane, hopeful attitude brought to the film by all involved. People (most people at least) are open to learning from change and to finding the best in it.

A moment of pure magic occurs when Neil's ditzy, superstitious mother experiences an epiphany of loss as she watches her son head in for his interview, and he (not knowing quite why) turns to wave goodbye. Something has moved, all have felt it, but Shani (the intuitive of the group) is the one who understands what it means. It is an intimation of mystery, of workings beyond anyone's ken, and for those with faith, of reassurance.

Brimstone and Treacle (1976 TV Movie)

Vintage Potter - provocative and disturbing

[10/10 · 23 September 1999]

My wife and I saw _Brimstone and Treacle_ at the Potter retrospective held in Boston a couple of years ago; we were discussing its implications for days afterward. Like much of Potter's work, it shows how good television can be when put in the right hands. Provocative and at times disturbing, it uses the devices of a moral fable to question our common-sense idea of moral judgment. A mysterious young man (Michael Kitchen) insinuates himself into the household of an unhappy suburban couple whose life centers around caring for their paralyzed and mute grown daughter. He has a plan for these people, and in the implementing of it he crosses the line into the unethical and the criminal. Yet we're being asked to look beyond appearances, because Martin is not an ordinary human. There's something demonic about his perverse toying with people -- not to mention his affinity with thunderstorms. As the film reaches its climax, another order of truth is revealed, one that stands our comfortable certainties about right and wrong on their heads.

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

A mystery, a love story, and a haunting exploration of memory

[7 February 1999]

Scenes at a European spa unfold while a man's mind tries to recollect a love affair of the past season. In one of the most deeply psychological films I have seen, memory itself seems to be the protagonist -- or is it the villain? What plot there is simply provides the material for a meditation on the uncertainty of knowing. The accomplishment of _Last Year at Marienbad_ is to make this point convincingly even in the case of that which one would not expect a man to have difficulty remembering: a sexual involvement and loss. It does so by a hypnotic combination of wheeling, dreamlike images of the resort's architecture and grounds, together with the incantatory, obsessive, recurrent tone of the narrative voice over. In doing this it also transforms a place where people go to be waited on and to play, into a labyrinth haunted by unsmiling shades, where remembering is both impossible and necessary.

Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)

nice to look at, but one problem...

[2 January 1999]

Beautiful visually, and well cast except for Julie Christie, whom I like, but who seems unable to dumb down enough to play the Scarlett O'Hara-like Bathsheba. This character seems to have a bullet lodged in her brain that every so often makes her act like an idiot, while the rest of the time she displays a robust sense of business management and English class structure. I just can't buy Christie's portrayal as a consistent one - whether it's her fault, Schlesinger's, or Hardy's.

It is a story of missed moments (farm proprietors sleeping through crises); and some other moments that one wishes had been missed. But then that's Thomas Hardy (as well as I can remember from high school English).

One anachronism in the scene in which Bathsheba's gown is tangled in Sgt. Troy's spur: the lantern she is carrying has to be battery-operated. Although it swings about a lot, its beam is completely steady.