Quattro Mosche di Velluto Grigio

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


Dario Argento's giallo genre (mystery, crime) established his reputation throughout his career and helped him to demonstrate an interest in horror films with psychoanalytic and sexual thematic structures. The nightmarish qualities of his films provide the audience with intellectual support and attitudes the audience arrives at on the screening. I think that Freud and Jung provided Argento with a belief system to draw on. Not only is the female protagonist in Four Flies on Grey Velvet schizophrenic 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 intellectual credibility to create. The visual style of the film guarantees a psychoanalytical reading of the film. The lighting, the point-of-view shots, the murderous gazes, and the dream sequences all reveal the potentiality for the psychological deciphering of the film. In the film, the unconscious represents supernatural power and the monstrousness of the human mind.

Sunshine

Sunshine (2007, Danny Boyle)

Sunshine is a film with all its conventional possibilities of a closed plot in which the scenes tend to give a sense of completeness to 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 standpoints 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 now intensifies the necessity of the Sun's existence for the survival of humanity. The final moment of the character revelation coincides 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

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. Muriel’s' character (Stacey Tendeter) reveals a certain capacity for traditionalism and morality while Ann's character is more adventurous and a 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 love affairs with Catherine Deneuve & Françoise Dorléac as the self-reflexive source for the narrative. Review By Morad Sadeghi