Occupational Soap Note

The Age of Innocence

In a world saturated with obscenity, which makes everyone to be more common and vulgar than its neighbor, a movie like The Age of Innocence good! Not that obscenity is absent from the masterpiece Martin Scorsese, who can also hide behind the gloves fresh butter and top hat, but staging the pretty successful feat to put themselves in unison with the wonderfully sophisticated prose of Edith Wharton (whose echoes reach us through the voice off Joanne Woodward). Disdaining the academic who had stifled the film, Scorsese refuses to fix his camera in endless stills. It multiplies the movement virtuosi (dives over the table of Van der Luyden, fades on the letters of apology, which came from Newton to a ball given by Julius Beaufort ) Plans and uses very short during the presentation of Ellen Van der Luyden in as if to signify his great freedom in a New York aristocracy as corseted as the Old World. Virtuoso, but Scorsese is incomparably elegant when it comes to expressing feelings of the evolution towards Newton Archer Ellen Olenska. Here, everything is played in the way of filming the hands of the protagonists. First to Met a kiss hand marking a remote curiosity embarrassed then shook hands before a more engaging fleeting but comforting embrace of wrist. And then there is that wonderful moment where Newton has to give Ellen her divorce, then his freedom. Imperceptibly, the camera gets rid of the depth of field (all these hangings, these trinkets that might act as a screen between the viewer and the truth of feelings) to better focus on the two sides of love burning the for each other socially but forced to hide their desires.

Liberal privately but respectful of propriety in public, Newton Archer is a complex, tortured and tying it in any way inferior to face Ellen Olenska, emancipated woman who thinks for crossing the Atlantic to win her right to happiness before to abandon the party for not forcing his lover to use cruelty to his fiancee. Figure sacrificed a delicacy almost superhuman ("I can not love you UNLESS I Give You Up," she said in Newton before splitting with him), Ellen Olenska falls into the category of great love, Lady Mortsauf for fiction in George Sand, in reality (also exposed to the conventions, also wonderful) that in Story of my life wrote these words came back to me in memory at the end of the film: " Marriage is the supreme object of love. When love is gone or does not sacrifice the rest. [...] There is the sacrifice of compensation that the vulgar mind can appreciate. Approval of the world's smooth routine use, a small quiet and sensible devotion that does not exalt, or money, that is to say, toys, rags, Luxury whatever? thousand little things which make us forget that we are deprived of happiness. "