Maddalena, a prostitute, is forced by the Naples police to exit the the city and return to her hometown Volcano, a volcanic island off of southern Italy. There, she is accepted only by her younger sister, Maria, and a younger brother. Their life is rendered miserable by the women of the village.
Category: Drama
——UPGRADED——
In the swinging sixties three girls discover they have the same boyfriend who has been playing around with them all while vowing fidelity to each. To teach him a lesson he won’t forget, the trio contrive to lock him up and continually favour him with their attentions in turn.
Shindo’s “Hymn” is one of many adaptions of Tanizaki’s classical novella ‘Shunkinsho’ (‘A Portrait of Shunkin’, 1933). The story tells of the adoration of Sasuke for his mistress, the blind samisen-teacher Shunkin, who treats him imperiously and subjects him to cruel beatings. After an unknown intruder probably one of her pupils, who seeks revenge for her cruel behaviour, pours boiling water on the sleeping Shunkin’s face, Sasuke blinds himself in order not to behold her disfigurement. Sasuke’s sacrifice, made in response to Shunkin’s tacit wish, seals their life-long relationship.
In a mountain village, Heita, a translator’s son, is a gifted boy but is shunned by the villagers. He can imitate birds’ cry and befriends another boy who works in a brewery. Heita also finds solace in the village pastor Yasugi and his teacher Michiko, but they too have problems of their own.
Elle steps off the balcony of her Parisian apartment, plunging to her death. Why has she done it? As her pawnbroker husband, Luc, looks over her dead body, director Robert Bresson’s eerie, elegant picture traces their lives together in flashback. Elle is the “Gentle Creature” — meek, dreamy and thoughtful. She entrances Luc, who pursues her passionately. They marry, but the match never seems right, and things turn sour, grimly heading toward an inevitable end.
Clara works a back-breaking factory job in a Milan slum to support her disabled husband, three children and carping mother-in-law. But when Clara is diagnosed as tubercular, she’s sent to a sanatorium in the Alps that proves the greatest vacation of her life. There she meets other patients who treat her with kindness, civility and an intellectual respect that is alien to her. When she falls for a handsome fellow patient, she wonders if she can ever return.
A Russian ballet dancer defects from the USSR, emigrates to England, and joins a ballet company run by a powerful, wealthy lady.
One morning Jun gets into an angry argument with his father over his girlfriend whom his father disapproves of. In a fit of bloody rage, Jun kills his father. He decides to turn himself into the police, but his mother stops him. Eerily calm after the shock, she suggests that they dispose of the body, and then move to another place where no one will know them. When Jun moves the body out of the house, his mother suddenly changes moods again and points a knife at him, as tragedy begets tragedy.