Or the ineffable, if readily explicable, passion of Bernardo Bertolucci’s low-budget, 93- minute-long Besieged, in which David Thewlis’ Jason Kinsky, an English pianist and composer living in Rome, falls madly in love with his African housekeeper, Shandurai, who is played luminously by Thandie Newton.Įlusive charm accounts for the enduring popularity of Bottle Rocket, the fragile little fable of cockeyed innocence that brought together, first as a short and then as a short feature, the talents of Wes Anderson and the brothers Wilson, Luke and Owen. And which, at its 98-minute running time, may be as magical as it is because of its compression, having been distilled from the much longer and explicit (or effable?) tale that the film-maker originally shot. The ineffable beauty, for instance, of Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, which is all about romantic longing. Longing, in its turn, leads to another hallmark that, like Carol’s epiphany, is difficult to describe, though the word ineffable comes close. Waitress, which presents itself as a whimsically optimistic little fable in which everything works out for the best, is all aswirl with strong feelings of anger, anxiety and longing. Once is most readily described as a love story between two musicians who meet on the streets of Dublin, but it’s also about music, creativity, collaboration and the banked fires of love lost. That sort of compression is often a hallmark of little movies with big pay-offs. What Carol succeeds in describing, with piercingly simple eloquence, is nothing less than her epiphany, a stunning emotional climax to a snippet of film that defines a whole life. Then, something happens as she sits alone in a Parisian park, “something", as she recounts it, “very difficult to describe". But her ridiculousness recedes and soon vanishes as she acknowledges old romantic yearnings, thinks quiet thoughts about her mortality, and considers her loneliness without flirting for a moment with self-pity. Carol is an unprepossessing figure, if not a faintly ridiculous one, and she scrambles some of her facts: Jean-Paul Sartre was not married to Simóne de Beauvoir. As she speaks, in earnest French with a fingernails-on-chalkboard accent, we see her exploring the city on her own. Carol, a frumpy, middle-aged Denver letter-carrier played by Margo Martindale, is telling her French class about one special day in her recent trip to Paris.
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