Verse
Fandel, John
world it depicts: the silent, austere life of early twentieth- The problem lies not with filming dance, which Ballard and century cloistered Carmelite nuns. ...
...on celluloid, things may be implausible, but must be around Therese, he avoids simple-minded judgments against clear and consistent...
...Her smiling Clara as a teenager and young woman...
...TOM O'BRIEN skeptical but genuine look at the life of a saint...
...Many receding sets which produce the illusion of three-dimensional scenes start, then seem to stop abruptly, as a new face is depth...
...Cavalier pre- Unfortunately, Ballard and Sendak forgot to control the sents Mouchet as eagerly anticipating "betrothal" to Christ story, which is told incoherently, even for a dream...
...world it depicts: the silent, austere life of early twentieth- The problem lies not with filming dance, which Ballard and century cloistered Carmelite nuns...
...some, especially in one scene when a circle of nuns affection- Hoffmann's basic story is, like all good fairy tales, genuinely ately cradle a statue of the Christ Child, and where Cavalier scary, a variation on all Gothic kidnapping recipes, from "The modishly insinuates that religion, in effect, is a cover for eros.Erl-King" to Wuthering Heights...
...Hoffmann, not the derived perfectly...
...UTCRACKER: THE MOTIONPICTURE is a disturbing misfire...
...Bigney archly overacts, declarations of love to Christ are without hidden meaning...
...I wonder if it was fully catches much of her spirit...
...There is no background music in the film, as if pablum of the elder Dumas or Tchaikovsky's librettist Marius sound itself were too worldly...
...Her tale of a young girl's dream of maturity and sexual awakening...
...The filmmakers wanted a stronger story, something Therese of Lisieux was the third (and youngest) of four "juicier, darker," as Sendak says, returning to Hoffmann's daughters in a French family to join the Carmelites...
...Even those familiar with the Nutcracker, both religious institutions and women...
...elusiveness, as if the camera itself saw as someone would who Even the filmmakers' daring revision of the traditional story was only half there, only half involved with material reality...
...Who, the London Symphony, and the innovative Pacific Northwest Whom who bath sent, 0 atomizing shade...
...Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf...
...motives are depicted as both joyous and erotic...
...Sendak have obviated by staging the ballet before magnificent Unusual editing also provides visual flair to Therese...
...Those sets provide visionary brilliance, and the dancing presented, but is blacked out again before it speaks, and then is some memorable moments, especially a wittily choreographed represented again for conversation...
...When combined with Pacific Northto blunt the heavy-handed post-psychoanalytical cliche that west's pyrotechnics, Hoffmann's dream- within-dream strucfeminine devotion to Christ always represents sublimated sen- ture, and the kaleidoscopic whirligig of Sendak's designs, suality...
...An erotic viding the film with some awkward echoes of headlines about nuance doesn't make such love in the least questionable, child abuse...
...She echoing less the Gothic ogre than modern Peeping Tom, proloves him...
...the Carmelites...
...wedding...
...lent love/lust with his niece, the heroine Clara...
...this film's awkward method, especially the uneven spacing of Most crucially, Cavalier uses his light, neutral, visual style the voice-over narration...
...Before agreeing to do the film, Sendak and Since Therese is the story of a young Carmelite canonized in Ballard insisted on returning to the original tale of early 1925, the odd, discontinuously physical style fits content nineteenth-century master E.T.A...
...Petita...
...Although Cavalier does not ignore the cost of such a Film, a fit medium for the fantastic, is, nevertheless, less vocational choice to the sisters' elderly, widowed father, or the forgiving than stage when narrative becomes tangled and conhuman realities of jealousy and backbiting among the nuns fusing...
...The film is a conundrum: a invisible to Ballard and Sendak...
...Nevertheless, it respect- will probably be invisible to children...
...to be confused is another...
...No face these roles are danced by Hugh Bigney (who doubles as the in recent film so easily conveys an innocence at once so "Pasha"), and Vanessa Sharp and Patricia Barker who play unpretentious, uncomplicated, and unsolemn...
...Commonweal: 660...
...The film is not simply "darker, juicier...
...The film suggests that this may be true for One troubling element, however, is all too clear...
...That love draws on all her personality...
...John Ftrdel IThe film is based on the Tchaikovsky ballet, but as AMDG revised by two superb visual artists: Maurice Sendak, the children's book illustrator, and Caroll Ballard, director of The Curious brains to make a bomb were made...
...Indeed, he often turns much less children seeing it for the first time, will be put off by them on their head...
...in her wizardly inventor, "Herr Drosselmeier," indulges in ambivacase, sexuality is seen as part of religion, not vice-versa...
...See for example, Poulenc's opera The Dialogue of Nutcracker becomes too much to follow...
...In the film Mouchet's look and acting have much to do with this...
...for a simply fully human...
...young girl's fantasy of coming of age, it seems based, however Therese presents an artist's interpretation of Therese of innocently, on the prior fantasies of older males...
...Ballet, and one almost expects something for Christmas to outdo Dickens...
...In Hoffman, a Bohemian, But the treatment of the heroine is much more subtle...
...Such editing conveys not battle scene between toy soldiers and an army of mischevious the nervous, jumpy frenzy of Godard, but rather a blithe mice...
...One would think tradition The moreof us blown up by one or two is here in good hands...
...To be and realistically stages her entrance into the novitiate as a charmingly mystified is one thing...
...line is apt in itself...
...Add to this Sir Charles MacKerras and Acknowledgedatomsplitters in Who's...
...Lisieux, lacking some of her depth and an explicit understand- The film has received a "G" rating, and its sexual subtext ing of the sources of her love of God...
Vol. 113 • December 1986 • No. 21
