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The mainstay is Women in Love, Russell swiftly returns the compliment in Savage Messiah. Welsh sisters at the turn of the century, one a budding bohemian (Kika Markham) and the other a puritan with a "shy, untamed look" (Stacey Tendeter), between them the Parisian art critic (Jean-Pierre Léaud). "To choose between two things, you must know both." Friendship and romance are capricious spirits in a shifting triangle, seven years of love growing hot and cold and hot again. Engagements are pursued and broken, dolorous separations and reunions are the norm, no wonder the matriarchs on both sides are suspicious of "mariages internationaux." Gentility and fervor, grist for the mill of the novelist: "Now I feel better, as if the characters had suffered for me." A middle-aged reconsideration of Jules et Jim, an Anglophobic reviewer's reconciliatory gesture, François Truffaut's distinctive tristesse at its most piercing. Charades in the clifftop abode, obsessive romantics and the games they play. Punctuating irises and recited diaries at the crossroads of cinema and literature, faces in ardent close-up for epistolary torrents. ("He courted me not with flowers but with beautiful books," maman wistfully recalls of her beloved.) Oil lamps framed through rain-specked windows, a panning pastoral of the Swiss cabin, deep hues in Néstor Almendros canvases. "Love stories should be complete..." Tendeter with dark specs reflects The Miracle Worker, Léaud and Markham with a sheet between them point up It Happened One Night. Above all, Marnie for the screen as a bedspread stained crimson following the climactic deflowering, a soft filmmaker's most brutal moment. It builds to the Nouvelle Vague child artificially aged at the Rodin Museum, contemplating his reflection alongside his mentor. "I knew joy and pain." The Brontëan strain culminates in The Story of Adèle H. With Sylvia Marriott, Marie Mansart, Philippe Léotard, Irène Tunc, Mark Peterson, and David Markham.
--- Fernando F. Croce |