Superficially strange material for Rosi, given its fantastic elements and lack of particular politicking, yet it gets to the heart of his style in a crude but potent way: after the dreamy overture, a brute cut to documentarian shots of Omar Sharif wrangling horses emphasizes that this “fairy tale” is going to wrench the fantastic out of the mundane. Rosi has done this plenty of times before, perhaps most notably in the vaguely Gothic horrors of Illustrious Corpses (which threatens…
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The Moment of Truth 1965
Barely a movie, almost a tone poem, even a bit oppressive at times, image after sheer image, forcing you to sort of take it on very simple terms, which makes it feel simultaneously elemental and cosmic, a myth without fantasy. Or maybe there is fantasy: with Miguelin (a real matador) portraying a fictionalized version of himself, the questions of self-mythologization and self-deception haunt every interaction between men and animals.
Peter Matthews characterizes the film’s critics as saying the movie was…
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Michael 1924
Decades of unfortunate neglect and banal reappraisal have swamped the film with ideological eisegesis: the Danish Film Institute notes bluntly that “all significant things remain unspoken” in the film, and what little is spoken (“adopted son”) tends to complicate the relationships in the film rather than pigeonhole them as recent reviewers are wont to do. Jean and Dale Drum, in their book My Only Great Passion, point out that the film “does not in any way overtly express anything homosexual” (whether…
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