Another star performance for Nina Ruslanova in what is in many ways an inversion of Brief Encounters (1967), here being the target of two men’s attentions. While in the prior film, Ruslanova’s character ultimately opts to emphatically forego heterosexual love and retire to a women’s commune, the conclusion Muratova sets up for her in Getting To Know the Big Wide World is incomplete to some degree, and perhaps ideally so.
Playing out on a construction site, Muratova’s narrative charts a…
Time to be emo over beloved Ruslanova dying needlessly of COVID again…
So much to praise about Brief Encounters, which functions as Muratova’s first solo feature film, and also her first feature that replicates the characteristic formalism of her student shorts after a relatively tepid Our Honest Bread (1964). Gorgeously filmed, with each character lovingly crafted, the film fits solidly within the feminist context of the French New Wave, even as it engages with specificity in Muratova’s own environment amid…
Sorry to The Batman (2022), I will be making this masterpiece the most-watched film on Crave with my bare eyes
Great performance by Valerie Pachner, and a familiar kind of corporate thriller these days that recalls to an extent the haunted minimalist trappings in The Girlfriend Experience.
I’m going to choose to ignore the twinge of concern that lesbianism is a major element in a narrative that is deliberately juxtaposing medicalized mental illnesses against others framed as “social acceptable” because they are celebrated and encouraged by corporate Machiavellianism, but it does feel a little hmmm given the active conversations in Austria about conversion therapy at this time (blissfully banned a few months after the film’s release, good for Austria).
Son: “I’ve been noticing you are having an affair—“
Virginie Efira: “And I’ve been noticing you are spending a lot of time with that twink friend of yours (no judgement), so maybe we all have some secrets, don’t we, JORIS”
Neo: “Hi, I’m—“
Lexy: “I’ll tell you who the fuck my One is, it’s my leatherdyke MILF mommy Trinity, that’s who”
