Nate’s Double Features (+1): Princess Edition

For this edition of Nate’s Double Features we’ll be looking at films with princesses in them. Recently I’ve had the opportunity to see two features – Kon Ichikawa’s Princess from the Moon and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Princess Yang Kwei-Fei - along with a James Ivory short film called Autobiography of a Princess. They were all very different and non of them really told me much about what it might be like to be a princess, but…they all had “princess” in the title. 

Nate’s Double Features: Romance Across the Ages

In this edition of Nate’s Double Features we will be looking at two romantic films from different eras; Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star (1929) and Patrice Leconte’s The Hairdresser’s Husband (1990). Both directors are delirious in their expression of romantic love, but only one of them has a moral center.

Lucky Star

No director of the silent era did romance better than Frank Borzage. At the height of his powers while working at Fox, Borzage partnered with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell to create a string of popular and beloved romances, with 7^th Heaven being the most recognizable. But it was with Lucky Star (a title that has absolutely nothing to do with the film it represents) that Borzage finally found the most potent mix of pacing and emotional directness. Lucky Star doesn’t have the visual splendor of many of Borzage’s other films, but it is far more effective as a tearjerker. It also drops the elements of fate that are present in 7th Heaven and Street Angel in favor of something more Earthy. Despite it’s melodramatic underpinnings, Lucky Star is dead serious about romance in ways that few films then or now would even begin to approach. 

Nate’s Double Features: Sensual Nightmares

Nate’s Double Features will highlight two films, related to each other through thematic or stylistic similarities, programmed by me, Nathan Marone. The double feature recognizes that movies, like all art, are interconnected. Each movie participate in a larger conversation that spans decades, languages, and great distances. Watching both films back to back would be optimal, but you can always at least see them in close proximity. Today we look at Repulsion and Sing a Song of Sex.