Why would anyone find it "endearing"? I'd have thought the only criterion here was usefulness.clydefro jones wrote:The booklet included with the release runs 44 pages. It has a 2010 essay written by Luc Moullet and translated from French into English by Craig Keller. Moullet's appreciation is loaded with references to other films, a practice I do not find to be endearing.
As luck would have it, I also have a copy of the booklet, and can confirm that Moullet's namechecks either refer to other films on which members of the production team on La Signora di Tutti also worked (especially Ophuls' own later output), or to other, usually later, films that make use of similar motifs. Both seem to me to be entirely legitimate, and indeed very useful in tracing how the same generic motifs (both visual and thematic) appear in other films on both sides of the Atlantic.
Seriously, does anyone else actually find this approach annoying? Here's a sample:
Luc Moullet wrote:Oppressive modernity is also evoked by the betrayal of the journalist who, as in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962], will scribe an extremely fabricated version of Gaby’s life that conforms more to public standards than the real life as it was lived. We get a better hold on the performance of Isa Miranda who, like Martine Carol in Lola Montès [Max Ophuls, 1955], is no longer just a pretty, characterless, and bland cogwheel subjected to the hardships of life. She’s a dry-run for the character of Madame de... [Max Ophuls, 1953] even more marked by futility: the grandeur of frivolous souls ennobled by their suffering, their destruction, their deaths...