Odeon Original Sound
Piazza Strozzi 2
tel. 055/214068
*for screentimes see the events listing
September 29
CARNAGE
Roman Polanski’s adaptation of the celebrated play by Yasmina Reza made a splash at the Venice Film Festival but surprisingly failed to garner any awards. 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 offspring’s 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).
September 30 to October 19
A DANGEROUS METHOD
David Cronenberg’s drama looks at the fraught relationship between Sigmund Freud, his protégé Carl Jung, and their shared patient Sabina, the hysterical guinea pig in the middle of the experiment that led Freud to publish his famous psychoanalytic theory and Jung to go his separate way. ‘Maintaining a cool body temperature throughout, “A Dangerous Method” shows extreme attentiveness to the subtler peculiarities of its strange story’ (Variety). ‘Cronenberg’s achievement is to have made “an action movie with ideas.” The film may be very heavy on talk indeed but when the dialogue is as sharp and double edged as it is here, that is not a problem’ (The Independent).
The Florentine is not responsible for changes in the Odeon Original Sound programme. We highly recommend that you check the Astra and Odeon websites, www.cinehall.it and www.odeon.intoscana.it, to confirm the dates and times of each film reviewed below as well as those in our events listing.
The British Institute
Lungarno Guicciardini 9
tel. 055/267781
New season: ‘With Great Emotion’: Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini
This 13-part season features the work of probably the then most scandalous movie couple before, during and after their eight-year partnership. Together they produced only five films. By 1948 Bergman was a huge Hollywood star and Rossellini, too, was already internationally celebrated for his neorealist masterpieces. Bergman’s movies were only beginning to play in Italy after the Fascist embargo was lifted, and Rossellini had never heard of her when she wrote him a flirtatious letter.
Wed, Oct 5, 8pm
NOTORIUS
A leading Hollywood diva in the 1940s was unlikely to remain out of the clutches of suspense maestro Alfred Hitchcock, and so Bergman’s depiction of the loose-living, confused and duplicitous spy Alicia Huberman is another of her most memorable performances. Caught in a dangerous ménage-a-trois, the daughter of an American Nazi sympathiser is subject to Hitchcock’s playful cruelty, and Bergman responds accordingly, helped or hindered by brilliant co-star Cary Grant. ‘Bergman was never more radiant and sexy nor vulnerable’ (Time Out).
Wed, Oct 12, 8pm
ROMA CITTÀ APERTA
Roberto Rossellini can be said to have kicked off the movement which came to be known as Neo-realism with this war-time resistance tragedy that has been in the canon of movie classics since its making in 1944. Based on the true events in Rome in 1944, the movie’s depiction of proletarian Rome’s ordeal under the Nazi occupation is offered by Rossellini as an historical record as well as a vision for a post-war future (that was never to be realised). One of the protagonists is Anna Magnani, another of Rossellini’s women, whose plight must have appealed to Bergman.(in Italian with English subtitles)
