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Women In LoveRating:
Release Date: 04 March, 2003 Retail Price: $14.98 OUR Price: $12.99 You SAVE: $1.99! Cast: Complete Cast (10 total) |
Women In Love Reviews
Beautiful...Poetic...Hot
There are so many important scenes in this movie:
--> A disillusioned lover walks off in the snow to commit suicide. He tosses his gloves aside.
--> Glenda Jackson takes a riotous sleigh ride and brays "I've never felt more alive in my life!"
--> The two male characters talk about female sexuality while splitting open ripe figs and sucking out the seeds.
But the prime interest is in the male nude scenes. The two lead actors wrestling in the raw by the fireside fascinated me from the first time I saw it as a teenager. And Alan Bates walking nude through the forest, whipping himself with fir branches - eegads!
Thank you, DH Lawrence and scriptwriter Larry Kramer (who later founded ACT UP)! You showed a curious young man (me!) that the world is larger, more dramatic, more beautiful than I ever imagined.
Key to Lawrence
This is a necessary film to getting a handle on D.H. Lawrence, a writer much more discussed than understood. Director Russell properly finds his key and turns it relentlessly: the art deco aesthetic, both formal and almost too self-consciously daring, which prevailed in Europe between World War I and Wold War II. It never took total flight and is easily parodied; it is thought of today mainly as a style of decorating furniture or buildings. It had a short life and was obliterated since the second war; Lawrence was quite up to his neck in it, and its strangeness throws people off who plunge into his works looking for the sexual liberator. That is all there, all right, but in his time the chick was still largely imprisoned in the egg, so to speak, of late 19th century Victorian aesthetics too.
Simply, it was a transitional period, and can be a little edgy. Russell is not afraid of it at all and has the guts to drink his Lawrence straight. So you get marvelous visual emblems wide open to parody or ridicule in lesser hands, stunningly presented: the dead couple like a bas relief sculpture on the floor of the drained pond; the naked male wrestlers curling into each other in a dark room, their forms outlined by dim light. Like it or not this was what was beautiful in Lawrence and the film pays it due homage without being subservient; Russell gets in his licks too. The aesthetic was so self-conscious that it can be delightfully hoisted up the flag-pole for a laugh, too, as in the wicked scene of Hermione and her parlor dancers.
There is no need to summarize the story of the two sets of lovers; just see it. The major actors have never been better. They become the complex characters, who while not totally explained are something better: totally present and alive. They pick up a big slice of the private and public aura of the period in their wake. Also, the film has the most incredible punch line at the end which Russell just perfectly transmits.
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