![]() ![]() Is there anything more romantic than someone jumping in front of a bullet for you? Technically, that’s Frank Farmer’s job, but by the time Kevin Costner’s clean-cut, ex-Secret Service agent leaps in to protect endangered diva Rachel Marron (Whitney Houston) - on Oscar night, no less - we know he’s acting out of love more than duty. Image Credit: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection The final scene, set in the bar of the Oak Room, features one of the most transporting locked-gazes-across-a-crowded-room moments you’ll ever see. Their relationship will be fraught with the drama of divorce, blackmail, a private detective, and other elements that, as staged by Haynes, acquire the heightened quality of a vintage film noir. ![]() The director Todd Haynes has made several masterpieces (“Far From Heaven,” “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story”), but he has never made a drama more darkly romantic and enticing, more seductive in its suspense, more mired in the agonizing compulsion of love than this lavishly mesmerizing adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel “The Price of Salt.” During the Christmas shopping season, Therese (Rooney Mara), a New York department-store clerk, meets Carol, a woman of the world played by Cate Blanchett with a femme fatale swagger just this side of threatening. Yet if you think about it for five seconds, that’s a retrograde way of putting movies into boxes. Movies that involve romantic stories of same-sex couples are inevitably placed in a category called “gay” or “queer” or whatever, often by their biggest fans. ![]() Image Credit: ©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection The movie argues for colorblindness while celebrating both cultures, modeling a relationship never before seen on screen. It’s also incredibly sexy, whether they’re chatting by phone in separate beds or sharing the same one in the movie’s scorching love scene. But unlike Sidney Poitier social drama “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” her parents’ reaction makes up just a fraction of the script, which gives complex backstories to each side of the couple. Set in Greenwood, Miss., where locals helped the creative team finesse the authenticity of the movie’s dialogue and detail, Nair’s contemporary interracial romance confronts the pushback of both the African American and South Asian communities to Demetrius and Mina’s relationship. Mira Nair took a pioneering risk in depicting the romance between Demetrius (Denzel Washington), a blue-collar Black carpet cleaner, and Mina (Sarita Choudhury), a young Indian woman whose family fled Uganda to the American South. Image Credit: ©Samuel Goldwyn Films/Courtesy Everett Collection Look closely at the dance of chemistry and arbitration between Roberts and Gere, and you’ll see that “Pretty Woman,” in its slickly-packaged-by-director-Garry Marshall way, is nothing less than a screwball celebration of the politics of love. It’s the world of high-gloss commodification that Vivian, played by Roberts not just with the boldest smile of her era but with the vivacity that turned her into a singular movie star, must navigate. And as far as morality goes, it’s not the movie that’s sexist. “Pretty Woman” only got tagged with the guilty-pleasure label because it came out at the dawn of the modern rom-com era (it sparkles like Tracy and Hepburn next to a lot of the films that came afterward). The truth, however, falls right in between. Others say that its story of a wealthy businessman (Richard Gere) who hires an escort (Julia Roberts) for a week to be his public romantic partner represents Hollywood at it most reprehensibly sexist. Some think of it as the ultimate guilty-pleasure rom-com. Image Credit: ©New Line Cinema/Courtesy Everett Collection The sight of Kincaid looking desperate in the rain, the downpour likely masking tears, is so radically counter-Eastwood, you’ve gotta believe it. ![]() “This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime,” he tells her. Still, that doesn’t stop him from trying. More touching is Kincaid’s admission that he’s fallen for Francesca, too, but knows she has no intention of leaving her family. It’s no big surprise that this dissatisfied housewife develops feelings for this stranger. He’s greeted by Francesca, a lonely war bride who offers to show him around (an Italian-accented Meryl Streep, who says so much in her silent gestures, like the way she absentmindedly touches herself in the places she wants to be caressed). Amid a career of macho performances, Clint Eastwood tapped into his sensitive side to deliver one of his most indelible characters in Robert Kincaid, a National Geographic photographer on assignment in Iowa, who stops by a farmhouse to ask for directions. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |