Word: absurdities
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Neurosis has become glamorous. Movie Critic Pauline Kael speaks of "the nervous breakdowns, miscarriages, overweight problems, husband troubles, and all those mental and physical ills which now comprise the image of a great star. In the frivolous, absurd old days, stars were photographed in their bubble baths; now they bathe in tears of self-pity...
...generation. In his usual abrupt abstract style, Godard scatters the screen with dissociated pieces of plot: a Marx-marked high school dropout (Jean-Pierre Leaud) meets and mates a Coke-stoked rock-'n'-roll belter (Chantal Goya), but not long after dies in an absurd accident, leaving the girl to face an amateur abortion performed with a curtain rod. The puzzle is further complicated by irrelevancies: switchblade suicide, lesbian interlude, subway murder, movie within a movie within a movie that culminates in a very dirty joke...
Technically, the new law demands that for every book a student wants to have exempted, he must go to an individual professor and have an individual exemption slip signed. This procedure is so absurd and so time-consuming that it could have had only one result. No one would have used...
...CHERRY ORCHARD (Caedmon). The Minnesota Theater Company, under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie, gives a balanced rendition of Chekhov's complex last play. The playwright set out to write a comedy about the social types in a changing Russia, but his characters, while absurd in their inflexibility, are also elegiac in their ineffectuality. Jessica Tandy plays an aristocratic Ranevskaya, as flowery as her beloved orchard and just as fruitless. As the arriviste, Lee Richardson is believably ambivalent as he reluctantly reaps triumph over his former employers. Hume Cronyn, however, sounds too nasally shrewd to be the bumbling clerk...
...corporation. Among the people he encounters: Annerose, a muddled, blue-eyed Venus who has deserted a wealthy husband, set herself up as a fashionable couturiere, and now longs for a "total commitment"-to a person, to a cause, to anything at all; Axel, a dazzling, dispassionate mystic of the absurd who has resigned his university lectureship to work in a hospital ward for thalidomide babies and preach a gospel of gratuitous, existential love, which Annerose finds appealing but scarcely persuasive; Octavio, a muscular young industrialist who believes in exactly nothing and who finally proposes to Annerose a commitment she finds...