http://tinyurl.com/2xwam3 New York Times
Breaking Through By KAREN DURBIN Published: November 4, 2007 Alexandra Maria Lara Alexandra Maria Lara, 28, doesnt shrink from a challenge. <http://movies.nytimes.com/person/85868/Francis-Ford-Coppola?inline=nyt-per> Francis Ford Coppola has given her not one but three women of different cultures and eras to play in <http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/336078/Youth-Without-Youth/overview> Youth Without Youth (Dec. 14). Based on a novella by the Romanian writer Mircea Eliade, the movie is a complex story of time travel, the transmigration of souls and the longing for eternal youth. Ms. Lara portrays the great love of an aging linguistics professor, Dominic ( <http://movies.nytimes.com/person/61768/Tim-Roth?inline=nyt-per> Tim Roth), and, as the films press notes have it, three variations on one migrating soul. Potentially this is the stuff of camp. ( <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/charles_busch/ index.html?inline=nyt-per> Charles Busch, are you listening?) But Ms. Lara never gets close, breathing such intelligent life into each of her overlapping characters that she keeps the movie grounded. She displays a similar command of character in the recently released film <http://movies.nytimes.com/gst/movies/titlelist.html?v_idlist=318163;10891;3 04118;354855;258592&inline=nyt_ttl> Control, bringing both passion and unexpected delicacy to the role of a model-chic music journalist who was the lover of Ian Curtis, the charismatic, suicidal and married lead singer of the post-punk Manchester band Joy Division. Two of the roles in Youth Without Youth are simple enough: Laura, a 19th-century university student whom Ms. Lara makes so gentle and warmly appealing that when she breaks off her engagement to the ambition-crazed young academic, you pity him; and Veronica, a vividly beautiful, exuberant young woman of the 1950s, who represents the time-traveling professors second chance. Veronica is glorious, but its when shes struck by lightning and wakes up as Rupini, a seventh-century Hindu mystic, that Ms. Laras gifts are put to the test. Not only does Rupini huddle behind her mid-20th-century hospital-room nightstand, terrified and babbling in Sanskrit, but before long, under the professors care, she is regressing nightly through time and a series of ever more obscure languages, until she approaches the dawn of language itself. As she thrashes around, hissing and spitting in a wordless struggle, Ms. Lara isnt absurd at all. Poised at the prehistoric interface of animal and human, she embodies nothing less than the agony of a being clawing its way into speech. [...] Anamaria Marinca In <http://movies.nytimes.com/person/323027/Cristian-Mungiu?inline=nyt-per> Cristian Mungius <http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/396871/4-Months-3-Weeks-and-2-Days/overview > 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Jan. 25) the Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca plays Otilia, a college student in her early 20s in Bucharest, who, by the storys end, has the disillusioned gaze of someone who isnt young at all. The movie, which won the Palme dOr at Cannes this year, is set on a single day in 1987 in Romania, two years before the violent end of the Ceausescu regime, which had outlawed both abortion and contraception. Otilias best friend, Gabita, is pregnant and barely capable of facing the brute reality of her circumstances. It falls to Otilia to wheedle, bribe and contend with the grotesque demands of the leather-jacketed abortionist who creepily calls himself Mr. Bébé, and to provide what comfort she can to her hapless friend. At a <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/new_york_fil m_festival/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> New York Film Festival luncheon last month Ms. Marinca, 29, right, appeared spritelike, slim, pretty and ebullient, quoting a favorite writer (As Ondaatje says, Biography is everything. ) and bubbling with curiosity and ideas. On the screen her transformation is remarkable. Tense and, initially at least, briskly competent, her Otilia looks tall, strong and rather plain, while Ms. Marincas quick intelligence is evident in the characters alert, expressive face. At first Otilia seems like a typical college girl: eagerly examining some American cosmetics for secret sale in her dorm, giving her boyfriend a good-luck snuggle before he takes an important exam. But as she navigates the darker irregularities of a dangerous black market transaction in a severely deranged society, her youthful resilience loses its elasticity, gradually giving way to something bruised and worse. At the festival luncheon Ms. Marinca pointed out that Otilia emerges from the ordeal knowing her own strength as never before. She does, but in a last close-up, her still face and anguished eyes suggest the terrible cost. <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html> Copyright 2007 <http://www.nytco.com/> The New York Times Company ---------------------------- Vali "Noble blood is an accident of fortune; noble actions are the chief mark of greatness." (Carlo Goldoni) "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." (Jimi Hendrix) Aboneaza-te la <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ngo_list> ngo_list: o alternativa moderata (un pic) la [ngolist] Please consider the environment - do you really need to print this email?
