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…
Celine Sciamma often makes films about tentative loves and burgeoning feelings, whether it is the young white swimmers of Water Lilies in Cergy-Pontoise, the black teens in the highrises of Bagnolet in Girlhood, or the little girl who moves to a new town and experiments with being male in Tomboy. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, that tentativeness is played out in the late 18th century on a Brittany…
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…
Muriel Spark is often a writer of harsh judgments and cruel predictions, with the former available in observation, and the latter as a technique. A word often used to describe her sensibility is acerbic, with Charlotte Higgins noting her “slender novels share a wit that travels along a sliding scale from charming to acerbic to utterly deadly.” (Guardian) Sameer Rahim reckons “Mur…