I’ve never seen so many old, conservative, rich people in all my days. Despite my not being any of these things, I kind of like the blue blazers with brightly starched shirts, prix fixe menus, and talking during movies.
Yesterday, after attending a string quartet concert and lecture at the fancy Episcopal church that effectively serves as the chapel of one of America’s wealthiest neighborhoods (think $15 million Gulf front estates), I went to the Film on Fifth series to see “Revanche” (trans. Revenge) an Austrian psychological thriller.
I’m often accused of not liking film. I have an active imagination and quick mind and therefore lose patience when presented with easy plots and indulgent scene development. I find old people similarly respond to film. They’re concerned with understanding what’s happening, not just reveling in the over-loud or dramatic or destructive. Though they do tend to discuss such things mid-film in over-loud voices with their hard of hearing mates.
Imagine a theatre full of 325 old, rich, conservatives plus one young, wandering, uber-liberal preparing to watch a film in whose description the only word I understood was “existential.”
Opening scene: naked man and woman in shower talking about tickling
Cut to: Viennese brothel laundry facilities
Peripeteia: bank robbery
Exposition: about an hour of chopping wood at grandfather’s house in the country
Denouement: bank robber unknowingly has an affair with the wife of the police office who shot his accomplice in the back (f. in opening scene), wife who has not been able to conceive gets pregnant from robber, police officer put on administrative leave, robber confesses robbery to mother of his child/wife of officer
Closing scene: More woodchopping
WHAT?!?!
Perhaps you’ll join in the collective exclamation from the 326 over-active minds assembled in the Sugden Theatre on Naples’s Fifth Avenue Sunday night.
Goat anyone? 