Word: mercifully
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...heir of Jean Gabin -- the soul of France," says Bertrand Blier, writer-director of six Depardieu films, including the Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs and the new Merci la Vie. "Like all the great talents, Gerard is a raw talent -- art brut. They learn a little technique doing theater, but the rest is inside them. Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Mastroianni: he's in that great class." Like those actors, Depardieu is capable of melodramatic excess; to give all is sometimes to give too much. But also like them, he has set an indelible stamp on his country's films, defining...
Thank you, members of the jury. Merci, M. Pialat and all your enemies in the Grand Palais. You brought the last-minute thrill of spontaneous animosity to a festival that had nearly suffocated in gentility. Until then, this assembly of 30,000 producers, directors, stars, distributors, critics and other swains of the celluloid muse could find little to cheer and even less to condemn. Oh, sure, you could watch Michael Sarrazin strangle a nude hermaphrodite in the Belgian thriller Mascara. You could cruise the low-rent Film Market and see ads for such films as Assault of the Killer Bimbos...
...trading partner. Standing before the Gothic tower of Parliament, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau welcomed him: "Our long relationship has been based on more than neighborhood. It has been based on friendship and on a sharing of values." Mixing French and English diplomatically, Reagan responded: "Merci. C'est un plaisir to be here with you today...
...liturgical-a parody (done, one should recall, for a public whose cultural background was still Catholic) of medieval head reliquaries. The image, however, is not a saint or a magdalen but that sibylline bitch of the fin-de-siècle imagination, the Fatal Woman, La Belle Dame sans Merci-enigmatic as a sphinx, cruelly indifferent as a Byzantine empress, wearing the features of the Divine Sarah and the aggressive glitter of a vintage Cadillac fender...
...Kingsley Amis characters-as well as the distaste the author seems to feel for his own creations. It has always been noted in extenuation that literary satire thrives on vile bodies and that swinishness justifies a measure of pique. But now Amis stands revealed as a misanthrope sans merci. From Ending Up it is clear that if anyone asked him the old vaudeville question "Would you hit a lady with a baby?" Amis might gleefully reply: "No, I'd hit her with a brick." And mean...