a screening of The Pumpkin Eater might be the perfect tribute.
In this film, Anne Bancroft plays so heavy and so light
so well
while disturbingly connected to the same thread.
I am such a sucker for the genre--The kaleidoscoping of the housewife's identity--but this film made me realize why it sometimes works and sometimes does not. The neurosis in the film is wound around something very real (that I won't reveal.) While The Headless Woman, on the other hand, a new film that played at the New York Film Festival this year, is an accomplished filmmaker's puzzle that, when the pieces are put together in viewer's brain, adds up to a complete picture of what is emotionally nothing but vapors, voyeurism, national symbolism and murky nostalgia.
Much more successful in this genre is Clarice Lispector's spiral of a story from 1973, "The Imitation of the Rose."
