Exegete.net, a site of literary and dramatic criticism

Archetypal mother

I would call Leibovitz' portrait of Bourgeois a landscape photo, as well as a texture photo, embedded in a very expressive portrait. The mixed emotions pervading the model's stance are baffling, a woman seen right at the chance moment when she's trying to muster her inner strength under some sort of crisis, or maybe retract with revulsion from a terrifying memory, or invoke the climactic verse of a prayer - all with a sense of urgency, of struggling intensity...

She is simply mythological, a seminal woman in whom originate all women's tempers and traits over generations, and whose age is measured in geological periods, incrusted by the motion of rocks and earth creases, abrupt canyons, desiccated river beds. Prominent sinews on her neck and palm snake in interlaced sheafs, the cheeks and front covered in mineral arrangement showing spent landscapes, dry and devoid of all colour.

Sometimes an inept gangster is just an inept gangster, and there's little else you can say about that.

"Citizen Gangster" is a low budget movie about a WWII Canadian soldier who felt so alienated in the humdrum of peace-time Toronto, that he started robbing banks for a living, around the year 1949. It's a story in the vein of "Public Enemies", Goddard's "Breathless", "Bonnie and Clyde", you name it, as you've seen it countless times: the "loveable" gangster, who fights not only society's rules, but also the conformity of being just another square-jawed bully with a gun.

This one, Eddie Alonzo Boyd (Scott Speedman, "Barney's Version"), married with two children, secretly leaves his bus driving day job, and takes his war-time Luger to a personal war against poverty (and... boredom?). He disguises himself with sinister make-up reminding us of The Joker, which sticks as his signature look; he jumps graciously over bank counters right into the lap of young female tellers, asking them politely, and at gun point, to "fill the bag".

Eddie's family life is destroyed as his secret is revealed, and a nondescript police detective manages to nab him and cuff him at the end of a downtown hit. And yet our guy breaks out of jail with a couple of acolytes (among which the wooden-legged hoodlum Lenny), and gets back to being the "dazzling" bank robber young Canadian women have come to be fond of.