
            To have one role played by two actresses prompts one to speculate that the director intended to have different aspects of her personality shown by the one or the other. When asked about this, however, Fernando Rey told me personally that was not the case. They merely had two actresses they liked and decided to use them both because they couldn't pick obe over the other. Considering Luis Bunel's surrealistic inclinations throughout his career -- and throughout this film -- there was no question Rey was correct. After all, he was there and anyone who knows women knows what you get one day may not be what's there the next.
    

That Obscure Object of Desire


            Toledo, 1808, a Spanish city occupied by French Napoleonic troops. A firing squad executes a small group of Spanish rebels who cry out Down with liberty! or Long live chains! The troops are encamped in a Catholic church which they desecrate by drinking, singing, and eating the communion wafers. The captain caresses a statue of a medieval woman and is knocked unconscious by her husband (a knights funerary statue). In revenge, the captain exhumes the body of the wife to find her face has not decomposed; there is a suggestion of intended necrophilia.Cut to the present day where a nanny is reading the voice-over from a book whilst seated on a park bench. The children in her care are given some pictures by a strange man in the park; there are implications of child abduction or pedophilia. Cut to a close-up of a spider and the interior of a bourgeois apartment where a man is fed up with symmetry as he rearranges his mantelpiece. The children arrive home and show the pictures to their parents who are shocked that the girls have such images. The parents are disgusted and yet erotically stimulated by the images which we assume to be pornographic when we see the images, they are revealed as picture postcards of architecture (there is a satirical nod towards Freudian symbolism in the images of tunnels and columns). The parents then let the children keep the pictures and dismiss the nanny. At bedtime, the husband cant sleep as he is woken in the night by a cockerel, a postman and an emu wandering through his bedroom.In the next scene, the husband visits his doctor, who dismisses these nighttime experiences as apparitions despite the fact that the husband has physical evidence in the form of a letter from the nocturnal postman. The evidence is never considered as the doctors nurse interrupts the conversation to tell her employer that she must visit her sick father. The nurse drives through a rainy night, meeting a military tank on the road that is apparently hunting foxes. The soldiers tell her that the road ahead is blocked; the nurse drives to an isolated hotel.A storm breaks as the nurse checks in at the small rural hotel. Some Carmelite monks are also staying at the hotel. She takes supper in her room while a flamenco dancer and guitarist perform in an adjacent room. The monks interrupt her as she is dressing for bed. They offer to use a holy effigy and prayer to assist her sick father, they begin to pray. Time has passed and the monks are playing a game of poker with the nurse and the hotel manager, gambling with holy relics, smoking and drinking alcohol.That same night, some new guests arrive at the hotel; a young man and his aunt. The young nephew has brought his aunt to the hotel for an incestuous affair yet another sexual taboo is addressed. They retire to their room, the elderly aunt confesses that she is a virgin, when the nephew pulls back the sheets to look at her naked body; she has the body of a young woman. The nephew is refused by his aunt and leaves his room to join another couple (a hatter and his female assistant) for a drink. The nurse and the four monks are also invited into the hatters room. While the guests are socialising, the hatters assistant dons a dominatrix outfit with a whip. The hatter, who is wearing bottomless trousers, proceeds to be masochistically flagellated by his assistant in front of the other guests who are shocked and leave. The nephew returns to his aunt, who is now willing to make love with him.The next morning, the nurse leaves for the town of Argenton, giving a lift to another resident who is breakfasting in the bar. This resident is a professor at the police academy. He is dropped off at work where he gives a lecture to a class of delinquent policemen on the subject of the relativism of laws, customs and taboos. The lecture is constantly interrupted until only two officers are left in the class. The professor continues, using a dinner party at his friends house to illustrate a point he is making. We then cut to the dinner party which is being held in a modern bourgeois apartment.The guests are seated around the table on flushing toilets. They politely discuss various issues around the topic of defecation whilst publicly using the toilets that they are sitting on. When a guest is hungry, he excuses himself and retires to a private cubicle to eat food.We cut back to the police lecture. The two policeman go on duty where they stop a speeding motorist (Mr. Legendre) who is rushing to see his doctor. Mr. Legendre is eventually told by his doctor that he has cancer and offered a cigarette, he slaps his doctor and returns home. Once home, he tells his wife that nothing is wrong with him. They receive a phone call informing them that their daughter has disappeared from school.We now cut to the school where the teachers insist that the little girl has vanished despite the fact that she is physically present. Her disappearance is reported to the police, the girl is present but none of the adults admit to her presence. In this absurdist scene, she is there the adults are able to see and speak to her, yet they act as if she is missing.We follow one of the policemen, who is having his shoes shined. We then follow the man who is sitting next to him to the top of a tower block. This man is a sniper who randomly kills people in the streets below. He is arrested, found guilty and sentenced to death but leaves the courtroom to be treated as a celebrity.Mr. Legendre is called to see the Prefect of Police who returns the missing daughter. The prefect is about to read a letter explaining how the girl was found but is interrupted and leaves to visit a bar. In the bar he meets a woman who looks like his dead sister (we see a flashback in which he remembers his sister playing the piano, naked). He then receives a phone call from his dead sister, asking him to meet her at the mausoleum. When he visits the cemetery at night, he finds a telephone in the crypt by his sisters coffin; her hair is hanging out of the coffin. He is suddenly arrested for desecration by officers who refuse to believe that he is the Prefect of Police.The prefect is taken to his office, where a different man takes his place. The two men treat each other cordially and discuss crowd control as if they are acquainted. We see the animals in the zoo, the two police chiefs arrive and direct police control of an unseen riot. The film ends with a close-up shot of an ostrichs head.
    

The Phantom of Liberty


            
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The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Cyrano de Bergerac


            This movie was set in Danzig, Germany before, during and at the end of WWII. The main character is Oskar Matzerath(David Bennent). His mother Agnes Matzerath(Angela Winkler) has two love interests, her Polish cousin, Jan Bronski(Daniel Olbrychski) and a German Alfred Matzerath(Mario Adorf). She ends up marrying Alfred Matzerath but continues to have an affair with Jan Bronski. She becomes pregnant with Oskar, so it isn't for sure that Matzerath is really his father. On Oskar's third birthday he is given a tin drum. After observing the adult world he decides that he does not want to be part of it. He throws himself down the cellar stairs to halt his growth. He is successful and no longer grows. He becomes very attached to his drum and whenever someone tries to take away his drum he is able to scream in such a high pitched scream that he shatters glass around him. The Nazi invasion of their Polish town begins. Oscar's mother Agnes ends up killing herself by eating large amount of raw fish. Jan Bronski continues to work at the Polish Post office and ends up being killed by the Nazis. This was considered the first day of the war. Oskar's peasant cousin, Maria(Katharina Thalbach) comes to live with Oskar and her Father. She becomes Oskar's step mother and love interest. Oskar and Maria have sex and she becomes pregnant. Although one can't be sure whos son he is, Oskar believes it is his son. Maria's son Kurt is born. . During the war Oskar joins a troupe of traveling dwarfs who perform to escape the war. He ends up meeting his second love, which ends tragically before the end of the war.
Oskar returns home for his fathers funeral. At the funeral his son Kurt hits his head with a rock. Instantly Oskar begins to grow.
    

The Tin Drum

Danton

The Return of Martin Guerre

Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno Live

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Certified Copy

May Fools


            Nishant, a young Indian writer living in Paris, is journeying down the Ganges, from its source in the Himalayas to the sea. Haunted by the fantasy, or the memory, of a beautiful Parisian woman called Jaya, he plans to write a book around his voyage. On the banks of the turquoise Ganges, one morning, he chances upon Zehra, an irresistible poetess-dancing girl in the tradition of the great courtesans, who performs in a nearby brothel. Zehra resurrects the memory of Jaya. As love casts its spell once again on Nishant, he asks Zehra to join him on his journey, but her illusory freedom is shadowed by a formidable network of the brothels spies. Nonetheless, Nishant manages to make Zehra flee from the brothel and join him on his journey. Romance takes over. A new life begins for Zehra as Nishant would like her to accompany him back to Paris. Half way down the river, at the height of their romance, Nishant receives a telegram. Zehra soon realises how Nishants fantasy of a half-real, half-unreal woman could transform her life into a journey of ambiguous surprises...
    

Jaya Ganga

Circle of Deceit

The Strange Life of Dr. Frankenstein


            In Persian folklore, there exists a magic black stone, Syng-e-saboor (the Patience Stone), to which one can confide everything. The stone listens, soaking in all the words, the secrets, the miseries, until it finally explodes, and on that day, one is instantly delivered of all ones sufferings and worries. Some even say this stone is the one in the Kaaba and on the day it explodes, it will be the Apocalypse.
The Patience Stone is an unusual war film, based on the eponymous novel that won the Prix Goncourt 2008, was brilliantly adapted to the screen by author Atiq Rahimi (Earth and Ashes, 2004) himself, in collaboration with his friend, the legendary scenarist, Jean-Claude Carrière (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1988, Belle de Jour, 1967, The Mahabarata, 1989, plus 136 more credits on his résumé). In Kabul in ruins, following the retreat of the Soviet occupation forces in 1990, rival bands of mujahidin are fighting like rabid dogs over the remnants of the city. In this apocalyptic world, a man lies comatose on a mattress in a bare room of his house. This warrior of Allah has been decerebrated by a bullet lodged in the back of his neck, not while fighting for his religion or his country, but during a fratricide fight that took place when one of his comrades insulted him. The angry exchange resulted in gunfire, and his serious wound. His wife kneels next to him, fingering her prayer beads, chanting the ninety-nine names of Allah. The mullah instructed her that if she did so, in fifteen days her husband would again be well. But after nearly three weeks, he is still totally unresponsive.The film rolls for only few minutes before we realize that we are far from the Occidental literatures exotic clichés regarding the proud Afghan warrior, honors place at the heart of the traditions, and the countrys beautiful landscape. Although the battle field is limited to a single house, the war is present and overwhelming, with its massacres and its shelling that make the spectator jump in his or her seat. The Patience Stone is, in fact, a war film, taking place in a crepuscular Kabul, whose name is never mentioned, and therefore could be located in any Muslim country, like Syria, for example.While the war rages around her, The Woman (we never learn any of the characters names) is hidden in the house, huddled near the bed, praying, changing her husbands perfusion, cleaning him, and chasing away the flies that enter his open mouth. Her husbands family has fled, leaving her and her two daughters without any resources and protection. During the periodic cease-fires, she ventures outside the house to get water and medication for her husbands perfusion, but the water-carrier and the pharmacist refuse to extend her any more credit. She also visits the home of her last link with her own family, her aunt, who runs a brothel in another part of town. It is here where she eventually leaves her two daughters for safety. Despite the dangers and her fears, she always returns to her house to care for her husband, without really knowing why, letting the days go by at his bedside. But she is now beginning to loose her courage and her devotion is starting to weigh her down. She stops invoking Allahs names. She is still scared of this inert body, but she keeps on talking to him anyway. In his silence, his authority still overwhelms her, even though she does not know if he can hear and understand her. At first, she recalls episodes of her life, including her aborted dreams, her forced marriage to a husband always on the battle front, even on the wedding day, and the day her father sold her sister to an old man to cover her fathers gambling debt. Her voice, timid and hesitating at first, affirms itself. She finally lets bitter words, crazy words, holed up far too long, escape from her inner self. She heckles Allah and his Hell, insults men and their never-ending wars, curses her warrior husband, a hero vanquished by his male pride, his religious obscurantism, his hate of the other, and goes as far as to reveal her most inner thoughts and secrets. Once quietly praying, she now screams. Once living in silence and self-sacrificing abnegation, she now emerges as a human being, a woman. She becomes a symbol, The voice that emerges from my throat, it is the voice buried for thousands of years.Sometimes, though, the shelling and the bullets come too close and The Woman takes refuge in the cellar of the house next door. In one instance, couple of marauding warriors enter her house, and she escapes being raped by telling them that she sells her body as they sell their blood, knowing that they would never touch her, as she is morally unclean according to the Holy books. However, the younger of the two warriors comes back the next day with some money to demand her services. She is devastated, but she must submit. Eventually, the young man, an orphan himself, keeps coming back. She develops feelings for him after learning his story, and of the sadistic mistreatment he suffers at the hands of his commandant. Her nurturing womans instinct takes over, as well as her femininity (and, of course, so does the money he offers her).Eventually, her Patience Stone, full of her pains, sorrows, frustrations, and of her most shameful and unspeakable secrets, explodes: her devastating, magic words have blown up to pieces all the burqas of the World! As The Man wakes up and reaches for her throat, she stabs him with her knife in the stomach. But the man, in a supreme effort, strangles her, liberating her from the marital, social and religious oppressions she has been enduring the whole of her life.But the story itself having some aspects of a fable - we can only guess we are in Afghanistan without it ever being named, the characters have no names other than The Woman and The Man, like some twilight Adam and Eve, Rahimi had to be able to embody this in an image, without denying to the fable the force of realism, and without denying to the real the symbolic sense of a fable. Thus the story ends with a fable-ending: The Womans eyes opens as she says, exulting, I am a Prophet! I just made a miracle!
    

The Patience Stone

Valmont

At Eternity's Gate


            During the Last Bastion of the Spanish Inquisition, 1790-1810, An Inquistador named Lorenzo (Javir Baldem) is being painted on various visits by artist Fransisco Goya when his fellows say Goya is painting whores as angels. Lorenzo tries to defend his work, saying it is those people--the whores and maimed --who the church needed to reach, to keep them from committing acts against God, not the artist just painting what he saw; then tells younger church leaders to pick up the Inquisition, search for those secretly practicing other religions.
Into this hyped -up search for heathens, a rich merchant's young daughter out one evening (Natalie Portman as Inez) is said to have refused to have eaten pork , making her practicing Jewish rituals secretly...Incidently she is a model Goya used who was an angel on a church ceiling; Lorenzo displayed an interest in her by asking if long hours with such models made Goya think of other things, and what was her name. Goya ignores the last but says "You have too acute an eye, Brother Lorenzo." When the girl's father comes to him and says Inez is a Church prisioner, Goya is angry but refuses to ask Lorenzo about her freedom.
The father donates all his gold to the church for his daughter. Goya allows him to leave the gold , pay for the painting of the Brother, and tells Brother Lorenzo the deal. She is kept by the Catholic Church for trial, and "put to the question" ,which brother Lorenzo has learned for her family but believes in the sanctity of--if you were innocent, God gave you the fortitude to withstand torture and you didn't sign guilt to a lie. Lying to escape torture went against God. If you lied you were just as much a heretic as if you'd done the act. The girl has admitted she did it after extreme torture and Brother Lorenzo tries to take leave of her family when her father has his sons and servants hold him. Goya, also present, is telling the father," you don't treat Brother Lorenzo like that !" when they grab him and bar the doors. They will let Goya free alone. After torture, Brother Lorenzo signs a rediculous paper that he had to be tortured pretty bad to sign. The father says he will produce it if Lorenzo does not get his daughter out.
Lorenzo is next seen walking slowly down the Church's prison hall, looking into cells. He finally finds the girl, younger and dressed in rags that show her more sexual than even the artist had made her in sheer angel gowns. He tries to look away and put his overcoat on her but as she leans to him to pray with him and he watches the sharp little mind love his Lord so much and speak so fast and earnestly, he suddenly pulls her to him and says "I do care about you, I do" and "that's alright" as she struggles. His new discovery is a selfish one (it doesn't mattter if she cares about him, he hasn't asked if he can hold her tight, he is only learning that the real girl in the painting, so infatuating, was someone he also actually cared for.) He may also have meant that in matters of the flesh he had not expected to care about his target. So he'd go to her , say do you want to pray with me, at which she'd fall into his love, say "Love me".Obviously he did--years later he learns they had a child.
Meantime the rich merchant has brought the Catholic Tribunal or whatever the signed statement and they are searching for Lorenzo, who has fled. Goya is visited by the church who takes his painting of Lorenzo away as part of a heresy trial they're working up on him. Lorenzo's signature showed the merchant and townspeople that torture did not work and was unfair; it showed church heads that people were in danger of not trusting "The Question" and that God gave His people fortitude to withstand torture--only bad people signed, making Lorenzo a false man of God.
Although Lorenzo was alone in Inez's room with her at least several times, he never tried to help her escape, even when he ran, himself--he left her there. He ran to France where the French Revolutionaries got him into a Spanish Revolution. He comes back as a leader of the Spanish uprising., and has fun sentencing to death the old Church leader who wanted him killed. He has a nice office into which Goya comes, now fully deaf. He tells Lorenzo that Inez was finally released, after Lorenzo says he could never forget the family--they were what changed him. Lorenzo has him bring her in.
She's a mess. She's just found no one waiting for her on release, walked home, and her family was dead around the stripped house. She has not combed her hair or looked in a mirror, has a "mad" twist to her mouth, but lights up at sight of Lorenzo and runs to him and begins to kiss his hand all over. Lorenzo kind of sits where she can't keep it up and asks gently what he can do for her. She says they took her baby. She says "our baby." He tries, looking at the deaf artist, to correct her. She says he's the only man she's been with. He asks if she knows how long she was locked up. She has no idea. (The baby would be 20). She's still looking for a baby she can raise. Lorenzo has a wife he loves, he's told Goya, and children, and can make 10 paintings, his family is so big now.He tells Inez two men will take her to her baby and she leaves happily. Goya demands to know where he really sent her. "She is out of her mind, she'll always be safe," Lorenzo says." Part of her insanity is to think he could have fathered a baby with her; Sorry she's changed to this.... Goya doesn't buy it and tracks down the baby and finds it is a hooker in a hooker park.
On his own Lorenzo has already tracked babies who were born in the Catholic dungeons and found she had run from an Catholic orphanage at age 7 and has cautiously also asked if the parents' names were written anywhere and told no. He has a soft, smiling manner of asking and it doesn't seem he is collecting very important information . He fondled a young girl's head in the orphanage, whom he seemed to hope was his, asking which one in the room was her, looking at all these girls under 18. But that's when they said none; she ran off at age 7. Her given name was Alicia. Now Goya comes to see him again. He has found the daughter. Where? Lorenzo demands. Goya bitterly tells.Lorenzo says in his calm way, " How do you know this is Inez's child?" "Because she looks exactly like the face I saw whenever I shut my eyes, the face that's haunted me all my life,..." As Goya goes on Lorenzo says "You are obsessed with Inez!" and Goya defends himself. He's looking out for her, which Lorenzo knows in his heart he is not. Goya has seen Alicia get in a rich man's carraige and go off for the night; the old lady peddling her say Goya can have her next. What he doesn't know is that Lorenzo is on that carraige, one time we are unexpectedly happy to see actor Javier Baldem, and when Alicia (Natalie Portman, also) tries to move on him, slaps her away angrily. This is his daughter. He offers to send her to America, he wants her to leave Spain (so Goya can't force a meeting). The girl gets sassy and attacks and is out of there like a bobcat while the big heavy Lorenzo is left asking her to please come back. Later Goya tries to arrange for the two to meet, after Lorenzo warns him with deep anger that there is no way he is going to help a mother learn that her daughter is a harlot and asks why he won't leave it alone. Goya has Inez, who he bailed out of a home for the insane, in his carraige and is in the bar trying to get Alicia to come out and meet her. Alicia says"Why would I care?" but then a counter-revolutionary attack with the Bitish involved enters the bar and arrests the harlots, dragging Alicia away so that she looses her baby she was holding. Another girl has handed it to her while going off on a date, but we never know if it is really Alicia's or not. It is left crying under a table. Inez has gotten out of the carraige and walks upon the carnage, used to it, and picks up the baby. She later talks to the shocked Goya like it's hers. He has seen Alicia carted off.
Alicia's group are freed by some handsome British , one who Alicia catches the eye of with a winking smile.
Goya is in Lorenzo's office . They are accusing each other of whoring to be there. Lorenzo went from church to revolution-- -well, Goya paints for the king, paints for the new leadership when the King is deposed, paints for anyone, paints for money, Lorenzo spits. At least, maybe he didn't see the light at first, but Lorenzo has morals. Just then there is news that the British are advancing , no one is stopping them, and Lorenzo runs out and gets his wife and kids hurriedly in a coach and is following them on horse when the Brits reach him. He turns off to let the coach get away, and mobs reach him and drag him into town, where the Catholics are reinstated in power and try him instantly, find him guilty, and sentence him to death. If he repents he will be spared. He looks at them, throws their pen down. He did not pass this test last time.
This time he is not going to be tortured, just have his neck cleanly broke. As he looks at a world where the man who sentenced him to death called him "my son", and few know him by name--Lorenzo--he can only look at a mob of strangers and see the new leadership walk out --his granddaughter now part of the inner royal circle as she stands thereon the courtly balcony with what appear to be the new King , Queen, and prince, Alicia at his side like royalty, never noticing Lorenzo as she smiled at the crowd and danced as his neck broke. But Lorenzo saw that she was doing all right for herself--that she knew how to "whore" through life. And that her days of abuse by men were over. Then he hears his name out of the crowd and, sweat filling his eyes with salt, just makes out the young face he'd "cared for", twisted and stark-raving mad, smiling broadly as she holds up a baby. He manages to give her a smile. I felt something was left out here as the baby should have confused him, made him think, oh, oh. And I felt a scene where he had to acknowledge he'd known her was in order , and should have been between all his dismissals of her as nuts while not really meeting her eyes, and this smile as if the sight of her (as she then was, out of her mind) pleased him . Only two times did it seem he cared about her--when he said "I do care about you" and when he said tersely that he'd never tell a mother that her daughter was a harlot. Nothing explained the kind of smile she evoked from him except if he had once loved that face while it smiled and to see it again was a present, a gift. It beat seeing her fighting for him, yelling no, getting pushed down,as he died--but her simpleton-manner, "everything's great now, I have a baby", would not have been enough to make me smile--I'd rather have seen her in her real mind, knowing what was going on , that I was about to die . But that out-of-it smile got him to smile as he watched the world be wrong about its need to murder him for being a heretic. In the end, children dance and sing around his body being dragged, head down , on a cart; the crazy girl joins them, picking up his hand and kissing it as Goya brings up the rear yelling "Inez!"
You don't want to talk about anything else after it's over, and it keeps popping up as you go about the next 6 or 8 hours, heavier fare than the things you are usually involved with. You keep thinking. Was he good to her? That smile, that was the one time, that she knew of, as she had no idea he'd talked to her baby , that it had grown up.But she thought he was her love. She'd kept a candle lit for him. The smile was a gift to her. He was ultimately, finally, good to her. But never enough--for his part in creating her crazed mind, a baby raised in an orphanage, etc.He never took on that guilt, unless in trying to make the harlot daughter go away.
    

Goya's Ghosts

Borsalino

Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait

The Ogre

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

Lover for a Day

The Artist and the Model

Every Man for Himself

In the Shadow of Women

Swann in Love

The Outside Man

A Bigger Splash

The Possessed

A Faithful Man

Birth

Chinese Box

Sommersby

The Salt of Tears


            Struggling to forge a financial career in white male dominated wall street society, taken for granted Laurel Ayers a black woman decided to change the playing field. Quickly realizing that only white males would ever achieve greatness she invents an elusive,Howard Hugh's like character Robert Cutty. Pretending to be Mr. Robert Cutty, Laural Ayers establishes a wealthy investment firm until events force Mr. Cutty to psychically materialize; as of this point he is never seen. Enlisting the help of her drag queen friend and her associate, Sally Dugan she is able to create a physical prosthetic entity. A chain of events mostly due to Laural Ayers adversaries force her to abandon her fictional character and deal her out once again. Down and out didn't necessary leave her out of the game. Laural Ayers is smart and proves she can have the upper hand. Striking back, she reveals who Robert Cutty really is to a group of her colleagues, proving it isn't who you are on the outside but who you are in the insideCheck out my review at: www.dereksheldon.blogpsot.com
    

Jean-Claude Carrière

Jean-Claude Carrière Movies or Tv Shows (upto Dec 2024) - Watch Online

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