Showing posts with label Kim Novak. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kim Novak. Show all posts

Sunday, February 26, 2012

One A Week Reviews #8: Libestraum

I've seen Libestraum on offer for 20 years now and always meant to watch it. I had heard it was something of a meditative mystery featuring the last screen appearance of Kim Novak and had the excellent pedigree of being directed by Mike Figgis. Also, it starred Bill Pullman along with two lead actors, Kevin Anderson and Pamela Gidley, who never really "happened," even though they kept getting the opportunities.

Turns out, I wasn't missing much.

It's fitting that a film named after a piece of music should open with a shot of a piano. In flashback, a man and woman are having a tryst only to be interrupted and shot. Thirty years later, we join Nick (Anderson) as he travels to visit his birth mother (Novak), who lives in the Nursing Home of Dramatic Lighting. She is dying, but as she'd given him up for adoption, this is the first time he's met her. He also wants to study the rare cast-iron-frame building that shooting happened in, now about to be torn down by Bill Pullman's character, Paul Kessler. Paul and Nick are old pals, though their relationship is stiff, awkward, and nearly ended by a work-site accident. Was it fate, or somehow caused by the ominous arrival of a mysterious man in a limousine?