Here's a lesser-known suggestion (one for cinephiles, and cineastes too):
Valerie Stroh's film from stories by Doris Lessing. Here is the short review
from my forthcoming website-archive of several thousand film
reviews/analyses that I have written since 1978:
A MAN AND TWO WOMEN (Valerie Stroh, France, 1991)
On paper, this does not seem like a great prospect. French actor Valerie
Stroh makes her writing and directing debut in an anthology film, where she
herself plays all the major roles.
Moreover, the source material is culled from a canonised body of modern
literature - three short stories by Doris Lessing. Stroh as performer runs
the gamut of exquisite female neurosis and desire, from mild-mannered
intellectual to tortured housewife, from torrid incest to pure whimsy.
What might have been an acutely painful exercise in narcissistic projection
becomes, in the event, a quite successful tribute from one artist to
another. Stroh explores and externalises the many personae within herself in
order to suggest that Lessing's stories too were a kind of disguised
autobiography. In a written prologue, Stroh offers this "cycle of short and
intimate tales" as "episodes from our daily sexual comedy".
The framing device is often the weakest link in anthology movies, and this
one (with Stroh as a writer reflecting on the choice between love and
career) is no exception. But despite some tentative direction on Stroh's
part and a fairly dull title story, the film comes alive in its two
strongest tales.
"Each Other" is a hypnotically perverse depiction of incest between brother
and sister. "Our Friend Judith", which traces a reclusive poet's sensual
awakening in an Italian village, calls to mind an equally fine evocation of
a writer's life - Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table (1990).
Adrian Martin
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