A spontaneous romance blooms between Kawamura, a professor touring Europe, and Naoko, a married woman living in Paris, scarred by the Nagasaki atomic bombings. The two protagonists travel around Europe trying to find themselves.
Month: January 2020
On a hot summer day three boys are splashing around the river. One of them gets his hand caught in the stone masonry of a railway bridge. Many peasants, the passengers from the train, which stops nearby, and the crews of tanks taking part in a military exercise flock to the scene of accident.
Described as an answer to Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, Fraulein tells the story of a German woman and a former French prisoner of war living in 1950s Germany. Instead of playing a role in rebuilding her country, Haneke’s heroine remains preoccupied with her personal affairs. Shot predominantly in black and white (with a color sequence added toward the end), Fraulein asserts Haneke’s place alongside the masters of the New German Cinema.
As the soirée goes on inside the elegant townhouse, why are people being rounded up in the street? And what is really being said behind the smokescreen of cultivated cocktail party chitchat about health clubs and island retreats? Employing the original cast from the Almeida Theatre production and directed by Pinter himself, this 1992 production of Party Time—a surreal drama of mannerly rudeness, emotional violence, and sexual tyranny—’bears all the hallmarks of Pinter’s strength,’ says critic Christopher Edwards, of The Spectator (London).
In his debut feature film, Kumar Sahahani employs highly innovative forms for depicting the conflict between oppressive feudal norms and a changing industrial landscape while making female sexuality and its complex mindscape the focus. The protagonist, Taran, the younger daughter of a Rajasthani zamindar revolts against the social code set by the class system by a sexual encounter with an engineer. This film was one of the earlier and successful examples experimentation in colour during the advent of New Indian cinema.
Afraid of marriage, Simone breaks off her long term engagement with her fiancé Paul de Lille. Paul heads to the top of The Eiffel Tower with thoughts of suicide. In another part of Paris and also afraid of marriage, Mignon breaks it off from her young lover. Despairing, Mignon also climbs to the top of The Eiffel Tower intending to leap to her death. There she meets Paul and the two compare stories. After discussion, Paul dissuades her from leaping and the two conspire to make their respective partners jealous by pretending to have an affair with each other.
When Moko the Clown passes away, his newly orphaned son Shawn takes up with mysterious wanderer Peter, and the two strangers become close friends and partners until a closely guarded secret rips them apart.