Summary: ‘Tick’/Mitzi is contacted to perform a drag show in Alice Springs. Feeling disheartened by the boorish behaviour of his audience in Sydney, he decides to go. He contacts transsexual Bernadette about being part of the act and finds her bereaved and looking for some time away from Sydney. Loud and precocious Adam/Felicia makes up…
Tag: Analysis
A Bout de Souffle (Breathless): Summary & Analysis
Synopsis: A small-time crook, Michel, who we initially see stealing a car in Marseille, shoots a policeman. On the run in Paris he spends time with a casual girlfriend, Patricia, an American trying to make her way in journalism. She eventually betrays him to the police and he is shot and killed while trying to…
10 (Ten) Film: Summary and Analysis
Summary: Ten sequences examine the emotional lives of women at significant junctures. Analysis: ‘I am unable to grasp the greatness of Abbas Kiarostami … Two digital cameras, a car and your actors, and off you go.’ When the great American film critic Roger Ebert dismissed 10 with these words (quoted in Andrew 2005: 8) he…
8 ½ (Eight and a Half): Summary and Analysis
Summary: Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ portrays a key juncture in the life of the fictional film director, Guido Anselmi (as played by Marcello Mastroianni). Guido is successful with audiences and well regarded by the critics, but he is having problems with his ideas for his latest work, a strange piece that seems to combine autobiographical…
4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days: Summary & Analysis
Summary: Mungiu’s second feature film follows the story of Otilia Mihartescu (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabriela ‘Gabita’ Dragut (Laura Vasiliu), two university friends in an unnamed Romanian town. The film is set in 1987, at the end of the oppressive Ceausescu regime. When Gabita becomes pregnant, the two girls arrange a meeting with Mr Bebe (Vlad…
The Street by Ann Petry: Analysis
While often treated as a realist novel about the interior lives of its characters and their internal experiences of oppression, Ann Petry’s The Street may also be read as a powerful protest novel—one with the potential to provoke specific political and social changes for the benefit of African Americans and women. Like the other black…
Sense and Sensibility: Analysis
AustenBlog declares that ‘‘She’s everywhere.’’ Laurie Brown’s time-travel novel published in 2009 is titled after the question the heroine constantly asks herself: ‘‘What Would Jane Austen Do?’’ More than a decade ago, Austen scholars and readers started their own Republic of Pemberley online (named after Darcy’s estate in Pride and Prejudice) as a clearinghouse of…
Le Pere Goriot: Analysis
Socially conscious literary critics have made much of Balzac’s realism: his gritty depictions of actual life, in which the sentiments of a social moralist crop up here and there amidst the careful accounts-keeping of a bourgeois citizen (who would rather have been an aristocrat); his troubled portrayal of the decline of the aristocracy and the…
No Longer At Ease: Analysis
With great subtlety and economy, No Longer at Ease creates an intricate psychological portrait of a modern African nowhere man. Outwardly, Obi Okonkwo appears a model of success and uplift, a local boy from the bush who rises into the elite to lead a glamorous life in the city with an enviable post in the…
Nicholas Nickleby: Analysis
Nicholas Nickleby was Charles Dickens’s third novel, after The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, and it is considered his first classic romantic novel. This latter point is important because Nicholas Nickleby marked an important turning point for Dickens, the definitive fork in the road at which he became a writer of fiction rather than journalism,…