Showing posts with label Scenes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scenes. Show all posts

August 15, 2011

Love and Death on Long Island (1997)


" .. study what happens to anyone beholding an actress--the spectator, the audience, or ourselves in any of our voyeur roles. And the most important thing in that vexed transaction is the way the actress and the spectator must remain strangers. That's how the magic works … For there cannot be this pitch of irrational desire without that rigorous apartness, provided by a hundred feet of warm space in a theater, and by that astonishing human invention, the screen, at the movies. And just as the movies were never simply an art or a show, a drama or narrative, but the manifestation of desire, so the screen is both barrier and open sesame. 

The thing that permits witness--seeing her, being so intimate--is also the outline of a prison." -- from the introduction to Nicole Kidman by David Thomson

August 13, 2011

Death and the Maiden (1994)


"Paulina Escobar (Weaver) is a housewife married to a prominent lawyer in an unnamed South American country. One day a storm forces her husband Gerardo (Wilson) to ride home with a kind stranger. That chance encounter brings up demons from her past, as she is convinced that the stranger, Dr. Miranda (Kingsley), was part of the old fascist regime and that he tortured and raped her while she was blindfolded. Paulina takes him captive to determine the truth. Despite attempts by both her husband and Miranda to convince her that he is innocent, Paulina is certain that he is the one, and forces her husband to be Miranda's 'attorney' in the 'trial' she arranges for him." 

This is the climactic scene, so if you haven't seen the film I recommend you watch it first. It plays better in context. Under the threat of death if he doesn't make a genuine confession, Miranda starts talking.