It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
1 While it is bigger than Paul Mescal, we can call it mescalinity: a post-superhero manliness that might also include Josh O’Connor, Harris Dickinson, Timothee Chalamet and perhaps Jacob Elordi, Austin Butler, and Jeremy Allen White. While it can be defined through its difference from the cumbersome masculinity of the Chrises (Hemsworth, Evans and Pratt), the Rock and Vin Diesel, it also see…
In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, Henry James might appear at his most morbid, but one way of thinking about James’s work is the attenuation of cause and effect. Here, a man goes each day to church and lights a candle to the various dead who are no longer in his life, including and most especially Mary Antrim, a woman he was due to marry. There, he sees a younger woman who is lighting …
1 He told the story as if searching for its ending, aware that there was more to the telling than he could presently convey. Five of us were sitting outside, around a small table at a pub in Marchmont. It was mid-summer, and the weather was as warm as we could ever recall. We were all in tee-shirts commenting on the weeks of dry, windless heat, and, of course, couldn’t help wondering if this…
Let us think of Hidden/Cache specifically and Michael Haneke's work more generally. This Austrian filmmaker (born in 1942), who worked for years in television before debuting in 1989 with The Seventh Continent, became around the turn of the century an important chronicler of Europe. Initially, the focus was on Austria, in films like Benny's Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronicle of Chance, …