Word: berries
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...slipping free of our modernist bonds, of regressing happily to a time when our serious fictions were both sure and energetic in their morality. But such works require time and space to grow properly. Compression is an invitation to contrivance, forced coincidence and melodrama. And Director-Adapter-Producer Berri (The Two of Us) refused to reduce this film to that level. Using L'Eau des Collines, a two-volume novel by Marcel Pagnol (which was itself a reworking of material the author used in a commercially failed film), Berri pursued the rights to a book he loved for six years...
Above all, the money bought Berri amplitude. His people are almost never isolated in close-ups that would falsely heighten either their emotions or the audience's reaction. The characters are mostly seen at some distance from the camera -- framed against and dwarfed by the abrupt Provencal landscape. Not one shot ever implies that they might achieve even momentary dominance over this country and climate. Quite the contrary. Even when they are sheltered from its wayward tempers, their comforts -- even Cesar's -- are at once crude and fragile...
...spaciousness of Berri's style is, of course, old-fashioned, so much so that it strikes us with the force of something new. But its most important function is to link his work with two currently disused narrative traditions. One is that of the naturalistic novel, which insists on locating characters within a detailed rendering of their world, forcing the reader to recognize that the seemingly minor incidents of life reveal the workings of vast, elemental forces. The other, astonishingly enough, is Greek drama, in which the psychological intimacy among characters is irrelevant, since their destinies are determined...
...point of view, was that it drove Arafat and most of the P.L.O. out of the country. But during the past three years, Arafat has been quietly rebuilding his strength in West Beirut. Since last fall, Assad's closest Lebanese ally, the Shi'ite Amal militia, headed by Nabih Berri, has waged a merciless battle against the P.L.O. in the refugee camps but failed to defeat...
...fighting continued, the big losers were clearly the Syrians. Damascushas 30,000 soldiers in northern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. Initial pleas by the Damascus government for a cease-fire were ignored. At one point, Amal Leader Nabih Berri ordered his men to "stand fast. Fight until victory or martyrdom...