May 30, 2023 | Rome, Italy

Providence

By |2018-03-21T18:49:36+01:00May 25th, 2012|Reviews|

3

Date: 1977

Director: Alain Resnais

Starring: John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn, David Warner, Elaine Stritch

B

edridden writer Clive Langham (John Gielgud) has crossed the line from aging into dying. The Chablis-guzzling Clive, deeply resentful of his successful younger children, conjures up a book plot fantasy world in which his family members are his mental marionettes in scenarios borrowed wildly from Virginia Woolf, film noir, pop fiction, and B-movie horror flicks.

Only a dad hell-bent on nastiness would give his lawyer son (Dirk Bogarde) a Mustang convertible with a funereal pallor or make his youngest into a werewolf. Stylishly wrapped in crimson silk pajamas and a peacock robe that could out-dazzle Camille, Clive weaves and warps his progeny into twisted situations. He bats them about, resuscitates them, before taking another cynical whack and making them utter lines like “violence reeks of spontaneity.”

When the “real” characters are introduced for his 78th birthday, his manor house resembles an Edward Hopper painting jolted into life. Musings on mercy killing, suicide, and free will spewing from a lesser actor than Gielgud or directed with less wit than Frenchman Alain Resnais’s would risk black hole implosion. But dark humor keeps the whole aloft. Painted landscapes punch up the fantasy, with Yves St. Laurent 1970s fashions adding to the panache.

About the Author:

Judy Edelhoff launched and became producer of a series of prestigious lectures on history, politics, arts and culture televised nationally from the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Previously worked in for the Folger Shakespeare Library. In Rome, she served as Special Assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture. Her interest in cuisine has included collaboration with Italian chefs and master chefs, including the prestigious French Laundry in Napa Valley. She is a native Floridian and later Washington, D.C. resident.