Word: disemboweling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...over this segment, clouding our faith in the idyllic surfaces that greet us. Gielgud's torment seems sharply discontinuous with the mildness of this family reunion. And yet a certain continuity is present in seemingly chance words and images, in Bogarde's attack on his father's desire to disembowel people for artistic purposes, in the very preoccupations which mark the dinner conversation. The resonances are different, however, the tone flatter. Where the dialogue was highly abstract and the characters rigidly controlled, there was a sense that Gielgud and Resnais were attempting to penetrate to the very deepest level...
...discover in his actual self-destruction. His fictional suicide is Isao lunuma, a right-wing student with an obsessional love of Samurai tradition and a hatred for the 20th century's destruction of imperial values. lunuma enjoys an almost erotic anticipation of the moment when he will solemnly disembowel himself for the Emperor. In the 1930s, he assembles a group of similarly obsessed conspirators to plot the assassinations of Japan's leading industrialists, hoping to precipitate a general uprising against the corruption of Japan's ancient national spirit...
...Russell is a director whose appetite for excess verges on petulance. His enterprise in films like The Music Lovers and The Devils was not to reconstruct history but to disembowel it; one felt that if he were to try a biblical spectacular, all the extras would be wearing Mickey Mouse wristwatches. His directorial tone has the subtlety of a timp roll played on an eyeball. A new Russell film, particularly one about an artist (the dramatization of artists' lives being his forte, or rather his fortissimo), is therefore to be approached warily -especially with a title like Savage Messiah...