Excellent movie with lots of great cinematography (we expect no less from Welles) and all sorts of bizarre imagery etc. Showed it to my mom a couple nights ago, and she liked it even more than I did and even picked up stuff I missed.
One thing had us stumped, though: why the gaggle of little girls surrounding Titorelli's studio?
"If I knew it was harmless, I'd have killed it myself!"
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The girls are in the book. They just add to the weirdness of the story. Read into them what you will, we'll never know Kafkas true intention. Maybe he just liked the absurdity of them. The way in which Welles presents them is brilliant (like the rest of the film). One of Orsons best!
shareThe shots of the little girls staring were brilliant – alternately creepy and humorous. I kind of had a "Suddenly Last Summer" moment with that scene, but obviously it's open to interpretation.
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The whole film is about paranoia and group dynamics (mainly bueracracy). So, they clearly added to that. This is a very literal film, people miss how clear it is by trying to find some kind of "message"
shareWell sorry but it's also loaded with very obvious references to sexual guilt and K's difficulty with his own conscience - an unruly and inexplicable 'law' that tells him that his every impulse is wrong. There's more than one implication in the film that he is inappropriately drawn to young girls, or perhaps it's just that he is conscious of a guilty feeling in relation to them because he's attracted to the women they'll become. Or because he isn't. It's hard to pin down exactly what the source of his sexual guilt is because that's the point of the story - that there is no specific guilt there, just a feeling of guilt and persecution.
The young girls and the painter's overtly sexual reference to his 'icepick' are clearly a part of this. K is being crowded, yes. He's at the mercy of expectations and rules he neither understands nor is precisely aware of. But he's also full of self doubt about his sexual tendencies and their pressing in is partly at least to convey his victimization at the hands of his own unconscious sexual conscience.
"I'll book you. I'll book you on something. I'll find something in the book to book you on."