Love is Close at Hand: The Age of Innocence Essay -- The Age of Innoce

Love is pixilated at Hand The senesce of InnocenceNovember 1998, written for FILM 220 Aspects of Criticism. This is a 24-week course for second-year students, examining methods of critical analysis, interpretation and evaluation. The final assignment was exclusively to write a 1000-word critical essay on a take up seen in class during the final six-weeks of the course. Students were expected to draw on concepts they had canvass over the length of the course. INSTRUCTORS COMMENT Brilliantly observed and beautifully written.The Age of Innocence is a film about confinement, restraint, and stoicism. Characters drift from tea, to the opera, and home again. They get a line lavish parties, and observe the rigidness of English decorum marry, have children, and die. emotion is mollified by these various diversions, and all of upper-class New York appears to be subject being anaesthetized by the idle task of upholding wealth and reputation. Only Countess Ellen Olenska and Newland Arch er, with their agitated delight in for one another, test the bounds of this suffocating social structure. Newland and Countess Olenskas love is in strong line of products with the emotional vacuity of their peers, and it is this very contrast upon which the pathos of their story hinges. The lovers relish the moments they manage to steal with one another, absconding to a remote log cabin or savoring a surreptitious carriage ride. The film is permeated by this sort of foreplay, teasing the viewer from first-class honours degree to end with auspicious meetings between the two lovers. Each time, however, the promising moments atomic number 18 snuffed by the pressures of New York high-society. Conjugal constraints force Newland and Countess Olenska to repress their longings, and in the product of everyday ... ...untess Olenskas turn slides off Newlands as she leaves the table, and disappears from his life. Newland is left with a form of Mays hold, petrified and cold, sitting i n his study to forever remind him of the Countesss delicate touch, and the obviously shallow and frigid wife who denied him his happiness. Referred to as his familys strong right hand, Newlands composure slips and shatters over the course of the film as he becomes more and more obsessed with Countess Olenska and the allure of her forbidden touch. The camera plays close attention to hands, reinforcing the rigidity and frigid decorum that pervade the film, offering the notion of touch as an escape from the pedantic lifestyle of upper-class New York. Ultimately, the simplicity of hands becomes the essence of life, love, and happiness, in a film saturated with customs, pageantry and pomp.