Lolita (1997) Region 1,2,3,4,5,6 Compatible DVD

Nabokov is a smutty and dirty writer. He wrote an outrageous book and used the outrage to make himself famous.So goes the cartoon analysis of him and his classic work. The people who have never read Lolita, the ones prepared to judge it unclean and unhealthy, are the same whose comprehension of satire and irony is limited. Lolita, among many other things, is a burlesque of desire. Nabokov knows full well that it's not normal for a grown man to fall in love with a pimply adolescent girl in pigtails and bobby socks who chews bubble gum and reads, for intellectual stimulation, gossip magazines about Hollywood movie stars. The point of the exercise is not approval or disapproval. Lolita is not a morality tale. It's a book about passion and desire and where it can lead a person, any person. As such, it can be seen as instructive. But as literature, not as an instruction manual.Lolita is a book for lovers, for those who have loved and been loved. It does not dance on the surface of things. Humbert's love for Lolita may not be to the taste of most people. Point taken, but so what? His love has all the elements of romantic love: infatuation, adoration, obsession, possession, exaltation. It's an honest book and Nabokov is fearless. If it was hated, it was hated for its honesty by those who are not fearless.Professor Humbert (Jeremy Irons) is besotted. He is lovesick. Lolita is not much more than a child — maybe 14 — and children are full of childish thoughts and emotions. It isn't that Humbert doesn't understand this. What, Nabokov interestingly asks, has understanding got to do with how he feels?Children love to play, so Humbert naturally becomes a plaything in Lolita's hands. He surrenders to this because he must, because choice for him has disappeared. If he could make her thoughts and emotions adult and mature, he would. But he loves her now, not in some distant hypothetical future. He must deal with reality as it is.One of the great virtues of this film version by Adrian Lyne, compared to the 1962 Stanley Kubrick version, is that we're able to better understand Humbert by having his background revealed to us. Unlike Lyne (and Nabokov), Kubrick neglects to tell us about another woman in Humbert's life. I say woman, but I mean girl. She was Annabel. She was young, pure, pretty and European, half-Dutch, half-English. Humbert was young as well, maybe 14 or 15. They met one summer on the Riviera when Humbert was holidaying in France with his parents. This missing information is crucial to making sense of Humbert's later behaviour.Humbert loved Anabel with the freshest love of all — first love. Who forgets or ever overcomes this? I am loved, says the loved one, and all the world glows radiantly with a sudden intense beauty, and all the people in it look happy.Annabel died. Yes, just like that life drove a stake through his heart. She took his love to the grave with her, a memento mori in death. He floundered. He was moody. He felt vertigo. But life asked him to continue and he eventually complied. He studied, graduated, got academic degrees, became a professor, wrote books. He became what they call successful, but success was just a way of forgetting, or of trying to.He left his academic post in England and went to the U.S. on sabbatical leave. He would study and write there. His life would be quiet and peaceful. He would extend the process of erasing the past from memory.It was summer when he arrived, the same season in which he had met Annabel all those years earlier, splashing in the cool waters of the Mediterranean. He found accommodation in a suburban house beyond the noise and clutter of the city. This would suit him — no distractions. Then of course, as it had to be, the ultimate distraction: Lolita. Irony, as plentiful on Earth as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.There she is, we see her in the hot summer sun, her skin bared to it and us. She lies on her tummy in the grass of the back garden, idly flipping through the pages of a magazine. A spray of water from the sprinkler showers her in a halo of light, her thin cotton dress soaked through. Humbert appears. He sees her wet, including the thin outline of her underwear showing through the dress. Another stake, a different one in a different way, driven through his heart. She looks up and smiles, a metal retainer on her teeth. Lolita's mother says something but he barely hears her. All he hears is the sound of the sprinkler and all he sees is Lolita, or, as he would later write of her:She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.And so it begins, his strange odyssey. Professor Humbert, the learned English professor, the man of letters and of bookish ideas, led back to the garden by a nubile Eve in one sock, back to the scene of the crime, to the original sin that was meant to shame and scar us all. We go with him because we must, because we are all complicit in that crime.

I haven't read the novel on which this film is based, but it strikes me as being an unsatisfactory film, really, albeit one that has a certain power. The central duo, Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain, are excellent - they could hardly be better cast to explore the theme of a doomed infatuation of a middle-aged man with a girl barely in her teens. For that matter, Melanie Griffith and Frank Langella are also brilliant. I suspect the novel is far less literal, far more about playing games with the perspective, where here we get something very literal, an account of how such a relationship plays out, except that it is complicated by his being her stepfather. This, and the mother's death, compound the lack of restraint shown by Humbert and make of it something more iniquitous than it seems scene by scene, where he seems quite compassionate and just in the grip of an unfortunate obsession. Perhaps this makes it interesting; but the means used to convey it are heavy-handed, with every interior given an unrealistic haze, a plangent score bringing a note almost of Death in Venice to the drama, and an emphasis on close-ups that just aims to give an all-round sensual effect, when really we need more clarity. As a 'trip' it is too lugubrious, which it is partly what it seems to want to be seen as; as a depiction of a relationship within the context of social taboos, it lacks focus, and doesn't show us either of the lives enough in the round, because we are always in these darkened rooms seeing them in intimate situations. For an analysis of the psychology of men interested in young girls, Nicole Kassell's The Woodsman is far more successful - clearer, telling us far more, and ultimately less depressing. This one fudges the issue by presenting Lolita through Humbert's eyes, and possibly bringing out ambiguity in the viewer by showing her as alluring. I don't think this strategy is very appealing, even though Irons is really amazing in his ability to retain some audience sympathy. It may be quite successful in presenting the unresolved clash of these two perspectives, almost as if the film is going along on two planes at once. Perhaps it is an impossible book to film, even though this is the second attempt to do so. It would be improved by being half an hour shorter - the whole concept is so overblown, the story so unnecessary; and the final meeting with Lolita is profoundly unsatisfying, somehow.

so sweet yet so dark. one of my favourite movies but i don’t romanticise it. interesting plot & many mixed emotions.p.s don’t watch this with ur family..seriously

Superbe adaptation, très fidèle, souvent à la ligne de texte près, du roman de Nabokov.Dominique Swain EST Lolita (bien qu'ayant 4 ans de plus que le personnage lors du tournage).Le film est même à mon avis meilleur que le roman qui parfois se perd dans de longues digressions (fort bien écrites mais par trop fréquentes, on aime ou on aime pas...).La musique de Morricone est magnifique, en 1997 on savait encore dans le cinéma américain, créer une bande sonore qui n'est pas envahissante, tonitruante, et anachronique, mais qui sait accompagner le récit.Un seul regret, de taille : pourquoi diable le réalisateur a-t-il jugé bon d'inventer cette mention à la fin du film sur la mort des deux protagonistes, dont le livre ne fait aucune mention ? Est-ce pour ajouter une morale ? Regrettable faux pas.

Bien

Ageless Lolita by Nabokov.Weird, depressing, but true and believable love story. Love does not respect age or moral values; it is above law, logic, reason, and sex. Very fine line between pedophilia combined with latent incest and melancholic romance. Final scenes could be omitted, they don''t fit into the main plot.Lolita is included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels, it is 4th on the Modern Library's 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century, and on World Library's list of one of The 100 Best Books of All Time.(Wikipedia)

Oui, pauvre Lolita, tombée entre les griffes de cet idiot moralisateur et grotesque, vivant témoignage de la compatibilité entre gros Q.I et connerie abyssale. La gentille gamine se défend avec les armes qu'elle a, rend fou l'autre pourceau, lui fait les poches et s'en va, le laissant se donner en spectacle, d'autant plus ridicule qu'il se drape odieusement dans les valeurs les plus bourgeoises. Tous les ingrédients de "L'Ecole des femmes" sont ici réunis, dans le contexte de notre époque: malfaisance et perversité accrue chez le barbon, un peu de perversité aussi chez la nymphette, qui n'est certes plus une ingénue, a quelques aspirations bien franches au bonheur et pas mal de lucidité sur les vraies valeurs du monde où elle vit. La libération sexuelle n'a nullement rendu les hommes moins hypocrites, seulement plus pleurnnichards et plus lâches. Les dernières images, vraiment émouvantes, suggèrent aussi que pour les femmes rien n'est facile, surtout quand elles ont perdu les maigres ressources de la séduction.