MOVIE • 1978

Recital

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Inspired by Simone De Beauvoir's writings Stephanie Beroes' film Recital addresses the state of 'woman in love', a situation fraught less with ecstasy than with risk and pain. Recital is a highly structured film. Each section involves a woman, situated in some external local, reading a letter or other text. It is clear that the women are not the authors of what they read. The first text is a letter expressing the pain of unrequited love, the abyss of frustrated passion, however read in a monotone with no peaks of feeling. This pattern of love letter reading is repeated with several other readers: one breaks up laughing when she comes to a passage: 'Oh, yes, I love you, I love you.' Clearly the subject is not one of true comedy, particularly since the letters recited are ones Beroes once earnestly composed. Beroes' goal, however, is a kind of distanced deconstruction of the experience, in an attempt to view it with the lessons of knowledge and time.