Taking time off for the holidays, we rented some flicks from Blockbuster, for the first time in a couple of months. Last night, we watched "Tea with Mussolini" and "Beseiged"....
"Tea with Mussolini" is directed by Franco Zefirelli, and based on a true story. It stars Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Lily Tomlin, and Cher. It is about a group of eccentric English ladies (the Scorpioni) and a couple of their American acquaintances, the run up to war, and the position of enemy aliens. The tale centers around a boy, the illegimate son of a merchant and a dressmaker, who is taken under the wing of the Scorpioni, taught to love art and to be a gentleman. He whom they looked after ends by looking after them, as he joins the Underground. The doyen of the group, the widow of an ambassador, lives under the illusion that she is under the protection of Mussolini, due to a promise made over tea before the war, and that she has extended this umbrella to her cohort. It turns out that she cannot protect them from detention, and that they are the recipients of the largesse of a fortune hunting American that most of them affect to despise. This American, in turn, has her confidence abused by a lover, who turns out to be a Fascist, and is in danger because she is Jewish. Only the intervention of her antagonist, the widow, and the good offices of the young man can effect her escape. Over all, the film is about caring for things, and the courage and resolve that arises from dedication. It is, in fact, wonderful.....
"Besieged" is by the director Bernardo Bertolucci, and is an artful, very quiet, tale of a man who seeks to win the heart of his African maid by effecting the release of her husband, who is a political prisoner. Although it is slow moving, and taxes one's patience, the observation of the sacrifice that the man is making for love, and the dawning realization on the part of the maid, and the conflict set up in their hearts as events work through, is astonishingly beguiling, and draws one in. It is a poem about the conflict between the purity of love and the insistence of desire, as it were. I recommend it, so long as one has a bit of patience..... |
