Word: flashings
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...folktale--at once pungently earthy and dreamily fantastic. It unfolds to the leisurely rhythms of its own peculiar inner life and logic. It's a magical film, where the horrors of war, the crude beauty and humor of everyday existence, and the wonder of childhood all intersect in a flash of dream and memory...
This crucial question haunts the rest of the film, not explicitly but as the backdrop to the parade of violent--but apparently unconnected--images that flash before our eyes. Is it by government or men that human misery will be cured? As the film ends, it seems that even the most masterful of politicians, a man like Sukarno, is a failure. Weir has no particular ideological axe to grind, but seems to be implying--and one can never be sure about this irritatingly obtuse work--that governments are impotent in the face of the most elemental, human problems. It doesn...
...same cartoon clarity whether it documents the townspeople's journey or dramatizes their sweetest, saddest fantasies. A girl bumps into some soldiers and sees them as G.I.s, come to take her to America; in fact they are Germans about to slaughter her, and her vision is a dream flash the moment before she dies. Early in the film, the villagers hear a faint but rousing rendition of The Battle Hymn of the Republic and imagine it is the American Army; in fact it is only a phonograph record, but the villagers believe, and one young man, scanning the hills...
Kate Nelligan portrays Susan as a superior woman locked in the palace tower of her awful loneliness. Her performance is a little essay on exalted anxiety: allowing her suppressed anger to explode in a girlish squeal, semaphoring fear in a flash of the eyes, ragging her estranged husband for not feeling pain as exquisitely as she does. But there are some moments no one could bring to life. Who could infuse dramatic tension into the leisurely reading of a newspaper? What actress could bring off that old Oscar-cadging ploy, the sudden quiet hysterics in a bubble bath...
...whose liberty a lie. I saw the Shadow of the Veil as it passed over my baby. I saw the cold city towering above the blood-red land. I held my face beside his little cheek, showed him the star-children and the twinkling lights as they began to flash, and stilled with an even-song the unvoiced terror of my life. The idea of the veil, as the way a man sees his life, is frightening and horrible. It cries out and angers you. Imagine such a limitation, such a prison for oneself or one's children...