The Name of the Rose (Annaud, 1986): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm
This is a 35mm presentation from Lost Reels.
Time Out review:
As intelligent a reductio of Umberto Eco's sly farrago of whodunnit and
medieval metaphysics as one could have wished for. Just who is killing
the monks of an isolated monastery in a variety of vile ways, and why?
William of Baskerville is the Franciscan Holmes called upon to point the
finger: a complex man, at once the great detective delighted with his
own powers of deduction, and a man both defeated by the brutality of his
age and enthralled by its mysteries (and it's to Sean Connery's credit
that he portrays as much and more). In addition, the film simply looks
good, really succeeds in communicating the sense and spirit of a time
when the world was quite literally read like a book, with impressively
claustrophobic sets, particularly the Escher-like labyrinth of a library
with its momentous secret. The monks themselves are marvellous, a
gallery of grotesques straight out of Brueghel, and if the film has
faults, they are quibbles: the murder mystery is solved too soon, and
rather too much plot is crammed into the available space.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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