Possibly the best feature-film acting in 1989 was done by Victoria Principal in the TV thriller, Blind Witness. Characters here certainly make a lot of mistakes, and so do the scenarists. The film is ill-written. Intermittently even Richard A. Colla‘s directing is bad, but the performance of VP actually makes BW worthy, a minor winner.

Principal plays a blind woman who knows the police have arrested the wrong baddies for her husband’s murder. In her scenes of bewilderment and terror, Principal gives the movie no less and no more than Liv Ullmann (of Face to Face fame) would have given it. By “no more” I mean she is un-histrionic. The authenticity in her can be rather peculiar, which is fine, but usually it is not—also fine. And Principal is impeccably feminine. Other actors appear in Blind Witness and they’re good. Principal is great.

Re What a Man Wants, from South Korea:

A man wants to love and—er—be loved? Whatever the case, the deceitful men in this flick say they love certain women, also deceitful—chiefly their wives. Do they?

During the 2010s, with romantic comedy, South Korea seemed to be on a roll. It may be true of drama as well; I don’t know. The 2018 What a Man Wants is a saucy gem, its script, though a slight head scratcher, mostly unpredictable. I thought a woman (superbly acted by Song Ji-hyo) who refers to the Chinese as “chinks” would thereafter be a villain in the film, but no. The three writers make her more complex than that, lovable even. All involved make Man occasionally affecting. The male actors Lee Sung-min and Shin Ha-kyun are daring and brilliant. Directed by Lee Byeong-heon, the movie is lively and sensual and . . . well, if it is a sex comedy, it makes a sex comedy like David O’Russell’s Flirting with Disaster look sick.

Available on Tubi.

(In Korean with English subtitles)

Marriage is often an idol, but isn’t much of one. A beautiful girl, Noemie d’Artiailh, necessarily weds the rich Jean Peloueyre in A Kiss for the Leper (1921), a short novel by the French Francois Mauriac, but the marriage is absurd, never consummated. Noemie is repulsed by Jean’s ugly body. After his death, however, she grows to love Jean and, in fact, must accept being “condemned to greatness”: renunciation.

Both characters are Catholic, though at first the devoutness belongs to Noemie. Jean is drawn to Nietzsche, without abjuring Christian belief. What Leper is about is the difficulty of spiritual growth in lonely and depriving circumstances. Noemie and Jean spiritually advance and then retreat, retreat and then advance. For Jean this goes on in a short life. Noemi never remarries: “Every path but the path to renunciation was closed to her.” But that’s okay; to Mauriac this reality involves “a poor woman” driven to “stretch her hands to the cool waters of Eternal Life.” It makes sense to do so.