Word: skolimowski
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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MOONLIGHTING Directed and Written by Jerzy Skolimowski...
...stylistic totalitarianism with deadpan comedy, and reveals its message through vignettes, moods, gestures, faces. Jeremy Irons' dour, handsome face suggests the first strokes of a political cartoon from an East European underground newspaper. Nowak is the story's narrator, its star and its sensibility, and Skolimowski challenges the viewer both to sympathize with the hopelessness of Nowak's situation and to judge his complicity in it-to be Nowak and to see him clearly. Irons, the obsessive puppy of The French Lieutenant's Woman and the genteel twit of Brideshead Revisited, rises...
...earlier films (Barrier, Hands Up, The Shout), Skolimowski has sometimes been too ready to sacrifice social feeling for a quicksilver cinematic intelligence. Moonlighting has its share of incongruous images (a flowerpot Nowak discovers in a toilet bowl) and gorgeous ones (a sweetly comic Degas overtone as one of the laborers reposes in a bathtub), but every shot is there to serve, heighten, reveal. The mundane and the surreal are one: Nowak sees images of his beloved, perhaps unfaithful wife Anna in a store window, on TV, naked in a cellar apartment. She is the vision-memory of all the hopes...
...which point Skolimowski asks the question, "Is any of this true?" and the complimentary "What is reality...
...finally, Skolimowski's film is frustrating because he attempts to duplicate the stream-of-consciousness style of the Robert Graves story from which this screenplay was adapted. In a literary context, steam of consciousness can be effective often because it can be reviewed. If indeed Finnegan's Wake is a masterpiece, it is rarely recognized as such on the first reading. It takes many re-readings in order to follow the elusive psychological themes. Indeed, in film, the only way to give an audience this "review" is to leave signposts, cinematic Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs in an attempt to give...