CARNAGE
Roman Polanski’s adaptation of the celebrated play by Yasmina Reza premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week and at the time of writing is still hotly in competition for the various prizes. Kate Winslet’s by now famous projectile vomiting aside, this very theatrical piece featuring a litigious quartet of middle-class parents drawn together and then pulled apart by their offsprings’ childish brawl obviously relies on the acting rather than the spectacle to carry the weight of a trivial but psychologically revealing encounter. ‘A pitch-black farce of the charmless bourgeoisie that is indulgent, actorly and… unbearably tense…the film barely puts a foot wrong.’ (The Guardian).
Odeon Original Sound
Piazza Strozzi 2
tel. 055/214068
*for dates and times see the Odeon’s website
September 21, 8pm
CASABLANCA
Famously and disparagingly described as cinema’s first ‘accidental masterpiece,’ Michael Curtiz’s immortal 1942 propagandistic romantic drama still has the power to tug at the heart strings even if most audiences can recite from memory large chunks of the flawless dialogue. Alongside the equally memorable Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman’s luminous beauty, her quiet but passionate demeanour and her distraught wrestling with the conflict between duty and propriety and romance and fulfilment is brought to the fore in the exquisitely realised character of Ilsa Lund. ‘Play it, Sam…’
The British Institute
Lungarno Guicciardini, 9
tel. 055/267781
September 28, 8pm
GASLIGHT
Gaslight (1944) was billed as ‘the strange story of an international criminal’s love for a great beauty,’ and ‘the strange drama of a captive sweetheart.’ Bergman’s moving Oscar-winning performance (her first of three) as the singer Paula Alquist in George Cukor’s thriller marked the peak of her Hollywood years. Pushed beyond the edge of sanity by her wicked husband (Charles Boyer) in nineteenth-century fog-bound London, Bergman once again delivered a masterful performance, and, as she often did, ‘excelled in an ordeal… her beauty seemed more vivid in masochistic situations’ (David Thomson).
The British Institute
Lungarno Guicciardini, 9
tel. 055/267781
