The Brothers Quay - Jonathan Romney (review date May 1992)
Jonathan Romney (review date May 1992)
SOURCE: A review of The Comb, in Sight and Sound, Vol. 2, No. 1, May, 1992, p. 64.
[In the following positive review of The Comb, Romney examines the film's sexual imagery and suggests that the Quays purposefully thwart the viewer's attempt to find conventional narrative meaning.]
As a woman sleeps, a doll on the edge of a forest attempts to climb a ladder out of a hole, while watched over by a figure with a twitching finger. When the woman wakes, the ladder collapses and the doll falls apart. The woman combs her hair.
The Comb carries no less than three subtitles—"From the Museums of Sleep", "Fairytale Dramolet", and "To Scenes and Texts of Robert Walser". The latter is a Swiss writer whose narratives inform the film, particularly his rewriting of fairy-tales, but the film is set to his work, rather than derived from it—so much so that the extracts from...
[The entire page is 726 words long]
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