A beautiful mysterious cousin is suspected of murdering an Englishman’s guardian. His plotting revenge is somewhat stymied when he unwittingly falls in love with her.
Love, mystery, murder and revenge are powerful motivators and provide the central theme in this period drama based on Daphne du Maurier’s novel.
Rachel Weisz’s casting for Rachel is not surprising considering demand for complex character portrayal.
Rachel keeps us guessing as to her true nature: her black Italian mourning attire, her ambiguous expressions – is she sad or just irreverent? Is it her cultural etiquette?
Roger Michell directs a film that looks beautiful and thankfully avoids the sterile appearance of so many of similar genre. You are thrust back in time and it feels believable with authentic settings merging with the personal interplay.
Who is Rachel? Are we all too quick to judge? Her Beguiling spell is cast on the young Englishman played by Sam Claflin and as we witness his firm resolve dissolve into passion for his cousin we realise that perhaps the human condition is more layered then we imagine.
Month: July 2017
Natural inclination
Blimey
Van Gogh & the Seasons
Earth yellows with saturated pinks, sinuous curving branches in crimson through to sienna. Ochre and mandarin stretch toward a distant horizon and the colours morph into a landscape of olive groves surrounding a sun drenched wheat field.
My quiet reverie is abruptly disrupted as an abnormally large group of people move to obstruct the view. But we are all excited and the throng of people disperse as quickly as they form..they seem part of an external picture that ever changes while the wheat field is forever fixed in time.
Somehow this sense of duality surrounds Van Gogh’s oeuvre. From the strongly modulated tonality of the earth tone Dutch period contrasting with the high key, chroma saturated, modernist vision of his late work; the crowded social realism of the The Potato Eaters (1885) compared with the late, nature inspired landscapes devoid of people such as Wheatfield with Crows (1890); his historical position that bridges the romantic tradition with modernist painting. And his very physicality presents a duality; the colour complimentary of his orange hair with his blue eyes.
If you manage to see the art amidst the heavy crowd invariably raises the question of the artist’s enduring popularity: how is it that he commands such following? This isn’t merely fame that is beyond the envy of today’s self obsessed society. It is of an altogether different variety reserved for the historically few. From the street to the cultural elite he is known and loved. There’s that duality again.
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