This month on the podcast, we discuss Luca Guadagnino’s 2009 melodrama I Am Love with author, critic, and Wesleyan film professor Lisa Dombrowski.
In cinema, chosen family melodramas are sprawling, surprising, and passionate films, playing with the traditional forms to reflect bonds that are often in flux and difficult to describe.
In Polyester, John Waters skewers the melodrama’s achy-breaky conventions by ramping them up to 11.
On Degrassi, no one is beautiful and everything hurts. If I had to sum up high school in a sentence, I couldn’t do much better than that.
In Fassbinder's Fear of Fear, a housewife’s desperation is as universal a story as you can get—the story of the impossible reconciliation between looking after and being seen.
Art is the high drama and the low drama, and often, as Schama shows us, it’s the reflection of the artists’ own life, their fear, pain, joy, and frustrations, their family relationships, loves, and losses.
L.A. Story is romantic, hopelessly. Our four lovestruck main characters fall in and out of their spells. The tone gets mushy. The freeway sign is embraced. The paradise could be believed.
The Happiness of the Katakuris shimmers with an almost Muppet-level cheer and earnestness, even as cadavers pile up and zombies skulk.
Brief Encounter is structured as a wistful confession told by a sensible person attempting to grapple with heartache in the most sensible way possible.
