Cover of Five Easy Pieces

The 1971 Bob Rafelson picture, Five Easy Pieces, is highly imperfect but hardly without meaning.

It serves up the dissatisfied man as antihero (played by Jack Nicholson).  It tells us life is insufficient and shows us how one senses he or she is wasting time after hopes are unfulfilled, promises unkept.  Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea, that is, discontinued his career as a concert pianist because he found his playing inadequate.  Now, for much of the film’s running time, he works with oil rigs.

The concepts here are very engaging.  Rafelson’s film should be seen.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), by Vittorio De Sica, begins with a title sequence whose garden imagery is not quite as colorful as it is flat and alienating. The sunlight in the film is nice, yes, but how many sunny days are ahead? From a novel by Giorgio Bassani, this is the one about a rich Jewish family, the Finzi-Continis, which lives in Ferrara, Italy and is oblivious to what is happening in their homeland under Mussolini. And there is also a middle-class Jewish family the head of which nurtures a disdain for the Finzi-Continis which would be more properly directed at the Italian fascists he supports—the fascists allied with the Nazis.

One of the middle-class Jews, the young man Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio), loves beautiful Micol (Dominique Sanda), one of the Finzi-Continis. Loves her to no avail. Micol’s dismissal of a worthy fellow Jew suggests the blindness of the rich and comfortable who are imperiled by the active goons. The young woman is callous, notwithstanding the shots of her under-the-blouse assets are, I’m afraid, gratuitous. . . Garden, even so, is a serious work of anguish. It has a lot to do with layers of political naivete—like what we see today. One should be honest, though: the content is even more appalling than De Sica’s good movie lets on.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

The widowed Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale), who determinedly seeks a wealthy husband, is at the center of Whit Stillman‘s Love & Friendship, a 2016 effort based on a short Jane Austen novel Lady Susan. Understandably the woman also wants a wealthy husband for her daughter, Frederica, but here a sinner begins to be revealed in her unfeeling rapacity. Lady Susan, who has had a dalliance with a married man, is bothered by Frederica’s unwillingness to marry a silly gent who is not right for her. Lady Susan herself, however, is not right for the amiable young man, Reginald (Xavier Samuel), who falls for her and is eventually accused by her of untrustworthiness.

I say again: a sinner. Lady Susan’s character delivers a tribute that vice pays to virtue. She is a civilizational hypocrite, eager to smile on manners and education and the Christian faith while settling for the mean objectification of various others. This takes place in 1790s England when religion still has vitality but a very slow secularization is proceeding as well.

In Beckinsale, Samuel, Justin Edwards, Chloe Sevigny and others Love & Friendship proffers fascinatingly successful actors. One is not likely to find fault with the film’s technical-visual design either, and Stillman, I think, has done his best directing so far here. His motion picture is modestly artistic, of course. It’s by Whit Stillman.

The Last of the Mohicans (1992), a Michael Mann film, is based on Cooper’s classic novel and a 1936 screenplay. Though much shorter than what Mann originally fashioned, it is nothing more than a potboiler but with thrilling scenes of adventure and bloody conflict. Indeed, the film is undistinguished and should not have been, the technically inadequate waterfall sequence being much to blame. At least, though, the movie is rather fun.

When is Henry, the main character in John Updike‘s late short story “Free”, actually . . . free? It may not be when Henry’s “too proper, too stoical” wife Irene dies of cancer, which follows the man’s long-ago love affair with a mistress, Leila. Now Henry and Leila are elderly. But do they feel free? When significant moments between a husband and a wife engender remorse is one of the story’s themes.

From My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, “Free” has moral resonance and is a small jewel of characterization. The sentences about Irene’s slow passing, with Henry beside her, are unforgettable, soberingly written.