Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Galchen, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Zeina Durra's Ardently Attentive "Luxor"

I want to thank Richard Brody for leading me to Zeina Durra’s beautiful movie Luxor. I saw it last night on iTunes and enjoyed it immensely. Here’s Brody’s capsule review in full:

The tension between the grip of memory and the power of immediate experience is poignantly portrayed in this documentary-rooted drama, written and directed by Zeina Durra. It stars Andrea Riseborough as Hana, a British doctor who checks into a grand but faded hotel in the Egyptian city of the title, where she has gone to recover from the trauma of her work in Jordan with victims of the Syrian civil war. She has history with the city—two decades before, she took part in an archeological project there—and runs into an Egyptian archeologist named Sultan (Karim Saleh), a former lover who attempts to rekindle their relationship. Hana is open to his friendship but may be too unsteady for love; her self-healing involves extended wanderings through the city, as if to rediscover lost aspects of herself. The dialogue is thin and the action is patchy, but Durra films Hana’s travels—and the places that she visits—with an ardent attention that fuses emotional life with aesthetic and intellectual exploration.

That “ardent attention” perfectly captures Luxor’s essence. 

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