Providence [VHS]: Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn, John Gielgud, David Warner, Elaine Stritch, Cyril Luckham, Denis Lawson, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Milo Sperber, Anna Wing, Peter Arne, Tanya Lopert, Alain Resnais, Juergen Hellwig, Klaus Hellwig, Lise Fayolle, Philippe Dussart, Yves Gasser, Yves Peyrot, David Mercer: Amazon.co.uk: Video

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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Providence - Surreal fantasy about reality, 1 Dec 2001

By

Rosemarie.Tauchmann@onlinehome.de (Munich, Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Providence [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Providence - with Dirk Bogarde, 1976

In Alain Resnais' solitaire of a movie the multi-layered cosmos of a family comes to life. Every time I watch it I feel myself drawn into the twilight zone of its multiple realities, effortlessly crossing the borderline between its own worlds and mine, pulled deeply into the story of 5 troubled souls meandering through each others lives. A splendid cinematic landscape unfolds, deliciously designed by its creators for an emotional survival trip.

Mr. Gielgud - the father, Ellen Burstyn - Bogarde's wife, Elaine Stritch - Bogarde's mistress and David Warner - they all unite their magnificent talents to create that surreal world called Providence.
Mr. Bogarde, then. His face. The eloquent backcloth of the unspeakable. His eyes. The portrait of the invisible.

An old family patriarch and famous writer conjures up images of his past while lying in his night of fatal illness. Confronted by death, the father is re-inventing his family. Subconsciously his brutal reflexions are posing the question if a moral language has to form the superstructure of human life.

„The facts are not in dispute!"
Dirk Bogarde enters the scene. We are witnessing a courtroom sequence, he is prosecuting an alleged killer. Razor-sharp voice, icy demeanor, menacing presence, he is oozing moral superiority in a mega overdose. But it is deeply unsettling, this lawyer's charismatic artificiality - is he the singer or the song? Mesmerizing.

A spacious villa on a sun-drenched mediterranean cost. An ideal backdrop for a relaxing gathering of family and friends I think. I feel the ice melting. I am caught in a trap.
On closer look the villa is a fata morgana of a home, its cold splendor mirroring the empty inner world of its inhabitants. A giant dollhouse, erected by the old puppeteer as a permanent home for his creatures.
Bogarde commandeering the house - watch him sit in a revealing shadow. A cigarillo. Elegant toy. Waiting to exhale.

The kitchen serves as the stage for the next act in the daily drama of Bogarde and Burstyn. The kitchen, a healing garden. The tongue tasts it. The tongue kills it. The couple moves in a brilliant choreography around this wasteland of a kitchen, starving in front of food. Class acting, shattering to watch.

Last set: the park of a huge country estate in England. The old man presides over his birthday table, surrounded by his family. But nothing is the way it seems. Bogarde, looking at his father with a kind of loving, melancholic resignation, eyes full of wounds unhealed. They are aliens to each other. The moral code of Bogarde - in antithesis to his father: „ Honesty, scrupulousness, discrimination, protectiveness, tenderness. Aversion to violence and a constant practice of terror."

It is a timeless, ageless work of art. It is tempting you to rewatch it, not by forcing you to take its view of the matter but by setting your imagination free. I truly recommend it.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great cast in a macabre comedy -- yes, comedy, though not in the knee-slapping sense, 19 Jan 2011

By

James Connelly - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Providence [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Quite an offbeat movie. The opening will cause much puzzlement. Gielgud rages like a dying Lear. His central and juicy role allows him to steal the show, despite some quite fine performances by others (Bogarde, Burstyn, Strich, et al.). Abstracted from plot details (if "plot" is the right word), and viewed from 30,000 feet or 10,000 meters, "Providence" has a Proustian quality: a dying novelist nocturnally grapples with memories, people and relationships in his own life, using, shaping and reshaping them as material for his art. Lots of wine (white).

Contains a curious artifact of filming: Original plans called for filming in the USA, but financing did not permit, and so it was filmed in Belgium and France. Even so, in one scene as Dirk Bogarde's character drives down the street, the viewer suddenly sees the European cityscape turn into Federal houses on College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, with a view in the distance of the Rhode Island state capitol.

There's a scene near the end where Gielgud character's two sons find a hedgehog. In Dirk Bogarde's autobiographic "An Orderly Man", he relates asking Resnais what that was intended to mean. "Nothing" according to Resnais, apart from just putting in something for the Cahiers du Cinema writers to puzzle and talk about.

Movie is hard to find but worth the effort to get. It was filmed in English, but there was also a French-dubbed version.

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5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Erm... and the film is really funny!?, 6 Dec 2005

By A Customer

This review is from: Providence [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Amazingly, what the other reviewer totally failed to mention is that this film is hilarious! A comic classic in my books! 'Nuff said.

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