12/13/2023 0 Comments Tv tropes barton finkFrom its title on down, If … is a movie about the power and peril of imagination, and the seductive thrill of wishing that we might externalize our inner lives for all to see and fear. (No wonder Stanley Kubrick cast McDowell as Alex DeLarge-his part here is like an extended audition for the ingratiating wickedness he displayed in A Clockwork Orange.) The film’s surrealist influences are clear, and they mark its divergence from the kitchen-sink realism of ’60s British cinema even as Anderson is mining the same deep, artistically rich vein of social and class satire as his more restrained peers. Two years before his role in A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell played Mick Travis, a high-schooler bristling with rage at his teachers and a group of bullying classmates who stoke murderous impulses what begins as a grimly believable depiction of private-school rituals descends into an outrageous, irresponsibly exhilarating revenge fantasy that may or may not exist outside of Mick’s headspace. pop stars, from the satanic majesty of the Rolling Stones to the teenage wastoids of The Who. ![]() And, in 1969, Cannes gave the Palme to a British film trafficking in images of rebelliousness and insurrection: Lindsay Anderson’s epochal If…, which transferred the energy of the era’s reigning U.K. In 1968, Cannes suspended the festival for the first and only time in its history in solidarity with student protests across the country later that year in the U.S., demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago brought similar tensions to the surface. The late 1960s were a hotbed of youthful resistance around the world. Charm may be in the eye of the beholder, but if you don’t find this movie irresistible, you should get your eyesight checked. ![]() Even as he was paying tribute to old Hollywood musicals, Demy was creating a genre template for self-reflexive directors from Bob Fosse to Spike Jonze (whose legendary promo for Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” is an all-out homage). Like all of the greatest musicals, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg transforms reality into Utopia, all smooth choreography and color-coordinated costumes, without letting us forget its artifice. To call The Umbrellas of Cherbourg light entertainment is completely apt considering its spry, weightless tone-its slender story line about a young girl falling in and out of love soars on Michel Legrand’s sweet score-and yet that description doesn’t do justice to the seriousness of its themes about economic anxiety (the object of Deneuve’s affection is a humble mechanic) or the lurking offscreen presence of the Algerian War. In the same year that Julie Andrews descended from the skies over London riding a parasol, the French director Jacques Demy immortalized rainy-day chic while also making a star out of the 21-year-old Catherine Deneuve. Viridiana’s unblinking vision of a world without true innocence isn’t misanthropic, but powerfully, unapologetically humane-a black comedy without pity or judgment. Nobody knew how to stick it to the Catholic Church like Buñuel, and yet it’s reductive to simply describe Viridiana as a fuck-you to the faithful-it’s an attack on authority and aristrocracy in all forms that simultaneously refuses to indulge in salt-of-the-earth sentimentality about those living lower down on the ladder. ![]() Its story of a young, beautiful novice (Silvia Pinal) who believes (wrongly) that she’s been raped-and thus spoiled for all time-manifests a wicked satire of immaculate conception and misapplied piety, culminating in a hilarious sequence parodying the Last Supper with a group of degenerate beggars standing in for Jesus and his apostles. “I didn’t deliberately set out to be blasphemous,” said Luis Buñuel of his slyly sacrilegious fable, “but is a better judge of such things than I am.” The juxtaposition of Viridiana’s success at Cannes and the scandal it caused across the rest of Europe, where it was denounced by the Vatican and banned by in Spain by the Francisco Franco regime hints at the film’s artistic brilliance, as well as the provocation enfolded within.
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