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Sunday, June 04, 2006
 June 16 Looming"Bloomsday is no longer a one-off party – it has become part of annual local cultures in so many cities around the world,” says the director of Ireland’s James Joyce Center. (Make that Centre.) Along the same lines, UD finally saw the film Nora, which focuses upon Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle. The dvd was a present from an independent study student at GW, a woman who’s writing a paper about Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. UD was delighted with the gift, but found the film somewhat disappointing. Film’s visuality means that efforts to get at the depth and specificity of philosophical/literary works and relationships (as in the adaptations of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Lowry’s Under the Volcano) tend to be failures. In Nora we are riveted by the peculiar sexy beauty of the actress who plays Nora -- her pre-Raphaelite locks; her burning brown eyes; her heavy lips -- and by her lusty life with Jim, but at a loss as to the point of the film, beyond its being an Irish love story. The film is unable to convey the thing it’s trying to convey -- the inner qualities that made Nora Barnacle James Joyce’s muse. |