Quattro Mosche di Velluto Grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet) (1971, Dario Argento)


Dario Argento giallo genre (mystery, crime) established his reputation throughout his career and helped him to demonstrate an interest in the horror films with psychoanalytic and sexual thematic structures. The nightmarish qualities of his films provide the audience with intellectual support and attitudes the audience arrive at on the screening. I think that Freud and Jung provide Argento a belief system to draw on. Not only is the female protagonist in Four Flies on Grey Velvet schizophernic and sexually abused character, but she represents the dark and mysterious sides of life. Her husband is more stable and sexually healthy. Argento's film narrative seems to suggest that psychoanalytic ideas give him an intellectual credibility to create. The visual style of the film guarantees psychoanalytical reading of the film. The lightings, the point of view shots, the murderous gazes and the dream sequences all reveal the potentiality for psychological deciphering of the film. In the film, the unconscious represents supernatural power and monstrousness of human mind.

Sunshine (2007, Danny Boyle)


Sunshine is the film with all its conventional possibilities of a closed plot in which the scenes tend to give the sense of completeness of the narrative. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the conventional ending of the film is haunting but optimistic. The science fictional and apocalyptic motifs of the film show us how every character achieves quieter maturity towards the end of the narrative. The human sacrificial theme is iterated periodically and the confrontation of scientific and religious stand points reveals the triumph of the scientific endeavor that is impossible without human interference. The symbolic scene of the ending that connects the character's later nightmare to the beauty and the peacefulness of state of his mind at the moment intensifies the necessity of Sun's existence for the survival of humanity. The final moment of the character revelation is coincided with his message that is reviewed by his wife on Earth and is not with any sense of ambiguity and bizarreness. Review By Morad Sadeghi

Les Deux Anglaises et Le Continent(Two English Girls) (1971, François Truffaut)

One of Truffaut's aims in Two English Girls is to underline the differences between English and French cultures in terms of dealing with romantic and sexual subject matters. The tone and the narrative strategy of the film shift when the characters move from British land to French soil and vice versa. The sexual repression scenes and the sexual liberation ones balance each other. Muriels' character(Stacey Tendeter) reveals a certain capacity for traditionalism and morality while Ann's character is more adventurous and risk taker. Ann may be less innocent but more sage. Muriel' s destiny is to suffer. She is the victim of the social tradition that hovers over her romantic and sexual desires. Her loss of virginity at the end of the film is poignant, frightening and violent. If the frame of reference for Muriel 's love  is  19th century romanticism, Ann's love represents a modern 20th century passion for liberation and freedom. The possibilities for the romantic encounters in the love triangle have prompted Truffaut to consider his own love affairs with Catherine Deneuve & Françoise Dorléac as the self-reflexive source for the narrative. Review By Morad Sadeghi