Keywords: Olivier Assayas
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 19 April 2017
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Cynical about the prospect of any kind of afterlife, Maureen nonetheless spends time holed up in an old Parisian mansion, trying to commune with the spirit of her dead twin brother. She is employed by a difficult and demanding fashion model as a personal shopper; literally, she spends her paid working days buying clothes, shoes and jewellery for someone else. The juxtaposition of the pure materialistic focus of this work, and her doubt-riven incursions into the spiritual realm, is intriguing.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 05 August 2016
The interviewees regard Vertigo with awe, waxing lyrical about its psychosexual subtext; but not a word is said about the inherent misogyny of a film that is explicitly about a man's objectification of a woman. The film's most interesting segment however concerns the pre-eminence of guilt in Hitchcock's films, and the role it plays in shaping human activity. This, says Martin Scorsese (a filmmaker similarly preoccupied with guilt and sin), may define Hitchcock as an essentially Catholic filmmaker.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
Famous actor Maria Enders finds herself cast in a new production of the play that kick-started her career. The play explores the tempestuous relationship between a businesswoman, Helena, and her much younger assistant, Sigrid. Back then, Maria played Sigrid. Now, she is to portray the older woman. Through her engagement with the material she probes her own ambivalence and insecurities about getting older.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 05 December 2013
As high school students they are too young to have begun the cultural revolution. But they try to fan its flames and bring its ideals to bear. Their idealism is at times tested against the cynicism or jaded moral certitude of older revolutionaries, one of whom chastises them for entertaining legitimate doubts about the means employed by Mao Zedong. There clearly is a gulf between healthy skepticism and wilful blindness.
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