Word: riva
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...Mauriac's 1927 novel Thérèse Desqueyroux and tells it in old-fashioned cinematic style. It is literate, formal, filmed with impeccable taste. It captures the dark spirit of Mauriac's novel almost too perfectly. Best of all, in Emmanuèle Riva (star of Hiroshima, Mon Amour) it has a vivid Thérèse, that young woman so desperate to escape "the slow, sure, horrible suffocation of provincial life" that she poisons her husband...
...unhappy history is reviewed in flashbacks. Here, the prose narrative becomes a burdensome, bookish device, but Director Georges Franju finds visual poetry in sharp contrasts between the gentle Bordeaux countryside and the taut, terrible stillness of Thérèse's face. Actress Riva never fails him. On her wedding day, "the wild force seething inside," she stands in church like someone paralyzed by news of disaster. Her disaster is Bernard-superbly played by Philippe Noiret as a prudish bourgeois lout whose only concerns are family pride and the valuable pine trees on his estate at Argelouse. Living...
...street, somewhere on the outskirts of a large city, almost always deserted. A bird might light on a telephone wire or a tree shudder briefly by the wayside, but all else is still. The camera pans in on a woman (Jeanne Moreau? Monica Vitti? Anouk Aimee? Emmanuelle Riva?). She is doing The Walk. Her hands flutter at her skirt, her hips tip from side to side, slowly, sensually. She walks past the tree, or telephone pole, or both, or a thousand of each. Occasionally, she stops, touches a fence post, a tree trunk, a street lamp, a spiny plant-should...
...confusing, particularly because the psychological nuances of the plot are even more important than the actual order of episodes. As in other New Wave films, motives are never clear; the power of individual scenes always suggests uniting logic without really convincing the viewer that the logic even exists. Emmanuelle Riva and Eija Okada act with such persuasive emotion that the film is unified by their mere presence...
Resnais has not allowed the dominant pacifist theme to obscure the nature of the characters themselves, and he builds the character of the girl with especial care, using a series of deft, slightly uncanny flashbacks. Both of the actors, Emmanuele Riva and Eiji Okada, perform excellently--she with an old woman's weariness--he with a solid diffidence which is never completely penetrated. Both as piece of cinematic fiction and as a document of the war, Hiroshima Mon Amour has outstanding merit. Every-one should see it at least once--more often if at all possible...