Waking Life

This unexpected treat is rambling, colourful and trance-like. It's a pilgrimage through a world of half-formed ideas. It's also highly observational: loosely shot on digital camera before animators added their own visual ideas and notes, building on the reality in front of them, making everything more subjective.

Director Richard Linklater is fascinated with the relationship between gestural talkers and attentive listeners. If we share this, Waking Life is rarely dull, despite its lack of narrative drive.

His other themes include consciousness, the passing moment and dreaming versus awakeness. But what really involves us is never being sure, from one scene to the next, whether we're being enlightened or led down the garden path.
posted on 4/30/2002 03:54:00 PM

The Lady and the Duke (L'Anglaise et le duc)

The octogenarian Eric Rohmer's latest is based on the memoir of Grace Elliott, an aristocratic Englishwoman who lived through the French Revolution.

Rohmer uses deliberately artificial backdrops for all exteriors, allowing us to keep in mind that this is a reconstruction. He obtains a very lively and memorable performance from Lucy Russell, playing Elliott herself.

The fate of the Duke of the title, Philippe d'Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), an Anglophile and pragmatist, is seen largely through Elliott's eyes. Despite the fact that his end, as a member of the French rather than the English nobility, is more arguably more central to the story of the Terror than hers, we easily find our way into his situation through their believable relationship.

Despite the bold use of digital backdrops, this is far from being a gimmicky piece of work. Rohmer is entirely at home with the material, which through one individual's story cuts freshly into the social, political and philosophical problems of the period.
posted on 4/30/2002 03:53:00 PM