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

Love is Close at Hand The Age 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, commentary and evaluation. The final assignment was simply to write a 1000-word critical audition on a require seen in class during the final six-weeks of the course. Students were evaluate to draw on concepts they had studied over the length of the course. INSTRUCTORS COMMENT brightly observed and beautifully written.The Age of Innocence is a submit some confinement, restraint, and stoicism. Characters drift from tea, to the opera, and home again. They attend lavish parties, and observe the rigidity of position decorum marry, have children, and die. Emotion is mollified by these various diversions, and all of quality New York appears to be content being anaesthetized by the idle confinement of upholding wealth and reputation. Only Countess Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer, with their feverish love for one another, test the leaping of this suffocating social structure. Newland and Countess Olenskas love is in strong contrast 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 dish out to steal with one another, absconding to a remote log cabin or savoring a clandestine carriage ride. The film is permeated by this secern of foreplay, teasing the viewer from beginning to end with auspicious meetings between the twain lovers. Each time, however, the promising moments are snuffed by the pressures of New York high-society. Conjugal constraints result Newland and Countess Olenska to repress their longings, and in the drudgery of everyday ... ...untess Olenskas hand slides off Newlands as she leaves the table, and disappears from his life. Newland is left with a sculpture of Mays hands, petrified and cold, sitting in his study to constantly remind him of the Coun tesss delicate touch, and the ostensibly 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 increasingly obsessed with Countess Olenska and the allure of her forbidden touch. The photographic camera plays close attention to hands, reinforcing the rigidity and frigid decorum that pervade the film, fling the notion of touch as an escape from the pedantic lifestyle of wellborn New York. Ultimately, the simplicity of hands becomes the essence of life, love, and happiness, in a film saturated with customs, pageantry and pomp.