Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/25/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, October 25, 2024

Eva (Joseph Losey, 1962)

Jeanne Moreau in Eva

Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Stanley Baker, Virna Lisi, James Villiers, Ricardo Garrone, Lisa Gastoni, Checco Rissone, Enzo Fiermonte, Nona Medici, Alexis Revidis, Peggy Guggenheim, Giorgio Albertazzi. Screenplay: Hugo Butler, Evan Jones, based on a novel by James Hadley Chase. Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo, Henri Decaë. Production design: Richard Macdonald, Luigi Scaccianoce. Film editing: Reginald Beck, Franca Silvi. Music: Michel Legrand.

Jeanne Moreau, as was so often the case when she was cast in a movie, is the best thing about Joseph Losey's Eva. She plays a high-class prostitute who makes the messy life of Welsh novelist Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker) even messier. He has hit the jackpot with his best-selling novel, now made into a movie, and is living it up in Venice when he meets Moreau's Eve Olivier. The rest is the old familiar story of the undoing of a man who has already started to come undone, so there's not much plot to follow in Eva. There are some glimpses of Venice and Rome in winter, denuded of tourists, and some interest to be had in watching how the inevitable occurs, but apart from capable performances, Eva doesn't have much else to recommend itself.