|
|
Tarfumes.com - Goodbye Again
|
List Price: $19.98
Our Price: $45.00
Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Starring: Ingrid Bergman, Yves Montand, Anthony Perkins, Jessie Royce Landis, Pierre Dux
Directed By: Anatole Litvak
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786302946550
Format: Black & White
ISBN: 6302946557
Label: MGM (Video & DVD)
Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: MGM (Video & DVD)
Release Date: 1994-03-07
Running Time: 120
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Theatrical Release Date: 1961
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: A beautifully pained expression of the bitter realities of old age...
Comment: I stumbled onto this movie the other night on TCM, and since it starred Ingrid Bergman (who I am eternally smitten) I decided that I had to watch it. What may to some be shrugged aside as nothing more than a well crafted `chick flick' actually turned itself into a beautifully pained look at the inevitable trap of age. It wasn't until the films final frame that it all hit me like a ton of bricks, the message so clear to me, that I had to watch the film all over again to fully appreciate all that I was being told.
`Goodbye Again' tells the story of a forty-year-old interior decorator named Paula Tessier living in Paris. She has been in a relationship with the very French Roger Demarest for five years, and while she loves him unconditionally he is far less than faithful to her love. Paula is constantly being cast aside by Roger for younger, more exciting fair, and she finds herself alone most nights. Then she meets the much younger Philip Van der Besh, a spoiled rich boy who happens to be the son of one of Paula's clients. He is immediately infatuated with her, but she is standoffish. He is much younger and she already spoken for, but when Roger continues to brush her off she begins to fall for Philip's persistence.
Of course, the relationship is not without its fair share of problems and detractors.
Like I said, from outward appearance this seems like yet another love story, but it is more than that, especially as it draws to its conclusion. Paula struggles to find her inner happiness amidst a society that has conditioned her to think one way. Sure, Philip is in love with her and his mother seems to be very happy with the idea of the two of them being an item, but her own preordained views on relationships leave her battling her heart and her head. She laments to a fleeting Philip "I'm old!" as if this were an end all to end all. The fact is that she is not old and he is not too young, but this is what she has been trained to believe, so whether or not she wants to, she has to.
Bergman is a beacon of light on the screen, commanding every inch of it with her flawless portrayal of this woman's strained emotions. There are quite a few scenes where she is looking at herself in the mirror, as if she were evaluating the person she is and the woman she wants to become. She has a mesmerizing command over her characters emotional deterioration; and that final shot, the look, that face; that revelation.
Breaks my heart.
Anthony Perkins is also quite good here, balancing his characters infatuation with true love and adoration. This is a far cry from the haunting performance he gave the previous year in `Psycho' and just goes to show that you should never typecast, no matter how good an actor is at one particular thing. Yves Montand is also very impressive as Roger, the heartbreaker himself.
I highly recommend this beautifully insightful film. Bergman was a goddess and should be regarded as such. It's a shame that these older films have yet to received the DVD treatment they so deserve. You can catch it on VHS or do a search for Bergman and wait for it to play on TCM, which I'm sure it will again soon.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hello Again!
Comment: This love story, initially called Aimez-vous Brahms (Do You Like Brahms?) contains all of the themes necessary to make it a continuous classic.
Three major performances given by three tremendous actors. Ingrid Bergman in one of her later roles is heart-breakingly beautiful, and Anthony Perkins gives a performance so joyful, vulnerable and nuanced, I find something different in it every time I see it.
Add to it a time in Paris that is magical and a score by Brahms that is unforgettable.
When will this be available in DVD?!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Imperfect Relationships Explored with Gallic Ruefulness But Hamstrung by Perkins
Comment: It amazes me to find out that Anthony Perkins won the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor award for his skittish, petulant performance as Philip, the aimless, lovestruck "younger man" in this 1961 Paris-set soap opera about a May-September romance with Paula, a successful, fortyish interior decorator ensnared in a going-nowhere relationship with Roger, an age-appropriate transportation businessman who has casual affairs with young women he dubs impersonally as "Maisie". Naturally, Roger takes Paula for granted, which leaves her vulnerable to Philip's flirtatious advances. However, Perkins is an actor intractably tethered to his definitive role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and unfortunately in his first follow-up film, he emits an aura of creepy adolescent obsession that makes you fear more for Paula's life than her heart.
On the upside is Ingrid Bergman's textured performance as Paula, and her mature beauty seems to reflect perfectly her saturnine situation. She is believably matched with Yves Montand as Roger in a performance that seems to echo his real-life situation with wife Simone Signoret when he embarked on a well-publicized affair with Marilyn Monroe the year before. Jesse Royce Landis shows up in her typical role as a pompous society matron, this time Philip's cheapskate mother, while Diahann Carroll shows up in a disposable cameo as a world-weary jazz chanteuse. Director Anatole Litvak paces the film a bit too leisurely and adds some silly but amusing touches like Paula's delusion of rain as she drives during a crying jag, but he creatively uses a circular structure to his plot by beginning and ending the film with almost the same scene. Adapting Francoise Sagan's Aimez-vous Brahms ..., screenwriter Samuel Taylor lends the sort of wry observations he contributed to his scripts for Sabrina and Vertigo. As of April 2008, this film is not available on DVD.
Customer Rating:
Summary: What is love?
Comment: Perkins captures the charm and passion of a young man trapped in his socially privileged circumstances who falls in love with a taken although unmarried older Ingrid Bergman, while the stunningly beautiful Bergman plays a confident woman who, deep inside, is desperate for her noncommittal beau's love (Yves Montand). A strong businesswoman by day, at night she craves his attention and weakens, accepting his indiscretions with floozies. She eventually succumbs to Perkin's charms as he courts her, for although a man much her junior, he gives her the love and attentions she craves from Montand.
We watch Bergman and Perkins play a dance of both truth and daydreams, and we question what is really possible, what is really felt, and, what is love?
This question is asked during a scene where Perkins' character is in a jazz bar and asks the signer, "what is love?" She replies in song, and unlike most films where I feel uneasy with the campy musical scenes, this is GOOD. (And who is she? Someone please leave a comment and let me know.) This one scene captures the feeling of the whole film- lovely, tragic, blue, above social mores, passionate feelings lurking beneath, truth coming out from the young but the hard truths lived by the more mature settled people.
At the film's conclusion we don't have a clear answer as to what love is, but we do know what it is not.
Customer Rating:
Summary: O tempore O mores!
Comment: This brilliant film version of the even more brilliant Sagan story has it all: The atmosphere, glamour and sophistication of Paris in the early 60's (though it hasn't actually changed much)and genuinely great performances by three masters of the acting craft.
I especially enjoyed it for the snapshot it gives us of how society viewed May/December relationships when it was the man who was the younger partner. Okay, there has been a lot of tongue-wagging about Demi Moore and that Ashton Guy, but not like it was then. Having been the Older Woman in just such a relationship, I can verify that every feeling and conflict was authentic, including Roger's reaction when she points out that she is doing nothing that he hasn't been doing all along. He says, with disgust, "Yes, but at least with me it's normal!" Interesting, given that his stepdaughter recently published a book claiming that he was sexually abusing her from the time she was 5 years old...
Still, it's a great film!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
