Word: bittersweetly
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CRAZY QUILT. Henry (Tom Rosqui), by profession a termite exterminator, is a completely illusionless man. Lorabelle (Ina Mela), who believes in Providence and butterflies, is a visionary maid. How this unlikely couple meet, marry and share a long life together is the bittersweet burden of this American fable...
Ironically, as her career skyrocketed, the specter of Piaf gradually became a restricting influence. Mireille wanted to develop her own style. Actually, though the similarities in intonation are unmistakable, Mireille's budding voice has little of the bittersweet pathos and built-in sob that endeared Piaf to generations of Frenchmen. When Maurice Chevalier heard 19-year-old Mireille sing a few months ago, he counseled: "You are young, pretty, and your success has made you happy. You should not sing unhappy, tortured songs. Sing on the sunny side of the street." And so she has, trading in her black...
...trust you." He, in turn, observes boyish discretion by bounding up at intervals to tussle with a window shade that lets in too much light. The sly tone is sustained through a dormitory matron's wonderfully irrelevant lecture on morals to the film's bittersweet climax in Prague, where the boy's parents forcibly separate their wayward son from his unexpected guest by dragging him off to their own bed for a riotous family quarrel...
...Kalthoum sings of love, of the bittersweet pangs of passions lost or longed for, unfurling verse upon verse of ballads that last for over an hour. Like a sorceress weaving a spell, she sings on and on, spinning variations on the same simple phrases, until 3 a.m. Then her millions of listeners, feeling spent, exhilarated and somehow cleansed by this solemn ceremony of joy, return to normalcy-until the next time...
Fados, the bittersweet songs of Portugal, are like rare vintage wines: they don't travel well. They are best savored in the small lantern-lit taverns tucked away in the cobblestone alleys of old Lisbon. There, in an atmosphere drenched with pathos and the aroma of musky wine and spicy sausages, the black-draped fadistas cry out in voices quavering with anguish. Against a back ground of weeping guitars, they sing of sin and love gone wrong, of wasted lives and impending doom. Fado means destiny, and its baleful laments are more than the fatalistic Portuguese can bear...