Word: conventions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Since June 1, Union Summer activists have fanned out to 20 cities. Paid a stipend of $210 a week, they are given free housing: an East Boston, Massachusetts, convent; a Chicago youth hostel; a Beaufort, South Carolina, trailer park. They are joining protesting sewage-plant workers in Denver; demonstrating against unfair labor practices on riverboat casinos in St. Louis, Missouri; pressuring a Washington department store to stop buying suits made in sweatshops; offering legal advice to strawberry pickers in Watsonville, California. They are picketing beach hotels in Hilton Head, South Carolina; knocking on doors in Boston to organize hospital workers...
...said commercial electricity rates will be cut in half. Those big items are ruinous enough, but Yeltsin's aversion to fiscal sanity goes further. In Yaroslavl, for example, he pledged $700,000 to house veterans of the Afghanistan war, $10,000 to help with the housekeeping costs at a convent of the Russian Orthodox Church, $20,000 to build a Muslim cultural center and $2 million for new barracks at a military college...
...Padovics' arrival raises the convent's current population to six, a population large enough for a love triangle, or, in this film, a love square. The Guardian (the convent's general overseer), Baltar, falls in love with Helene and tries to set up the professor with the librarian, Piedade, in order to win Helene's affections for himself. Piedade, meanwhile, is a beautiful, porcelain-like young woman, of the purest mind and flesh; she often quotes passages of Faust in the original German and she loves Baltar with a fervent--and slightly incestuous--daughterly respect. Helene pretends to desire Baltar...
With laptop and wife Helene (Deneuve) in hand, Padovic travels to the nearly deserted convent, a cluster of decaying and frequently robbed churches, altars and sanctuaries on a hill overlooking the ocean...
Oliveira builds on the sexuality, religion and Faustian philosophy of the convent setting and tries to weave a new, intricate twist into the good vs. evil plot. But after 90 minutes of sparse dialogue, sparse interaction and even sparser coherence, "The Convent" ends with an inexplicable supernatural occurence--inexplicable in that it does not complete, expand or shed light on any previous theme. With its too frequent literary and biblical references and the overwhelmingly stark, gripping scenery, "The Convent" strives toward artsy epic but falls somewhere in the midst of artsy mediocrity...