In the magnificent verdant landscapes of old England ,a young girl and her sister stifle in a puritan sexually-repressed atmosphere;the father,a minister ,is surrounded by a family living in the past -particularly the grandma- ,the mother left the house a long time ago and the relatives tell them their branch of the family is degenerate ;the meal ,when the girls come back from France ,is subject to holy writ quotations (the prodigal "daughters " and the fat calf),and when the eldest tells her dad she needs an occupation,he suggest she give Sunday school lessons.This milieu is rotten to the core ,the heroine seems to live in a gilded cage .Leo ,the local bourgeois lad ,enjoys looking at the others when they work(the dam is a transparent metaphor which will be smartly used for the conclusion) .Even the "modern " couple" is not that liberal,particularly the woman who is horrified when the girl tells her she is in love with a gypsy:sexual liberation,OK ,but stick with your own kind! When th gypsy opens the car door and let the maid out ,he opens the floodgates :freom this moment on,the good girl will rebel against her milieu:the show,which includes risqué jokes and French can -can(not shown),the slap in Leo's face ,the visit to those "persons" who live like animals , the swimming in the nude ;in fact the gypsy's presence is not long on the screen ,he has no name ,he is the en-lightener : a crude uneducated man is the only person who has understood the girl's lack of love and tenderness.
The bursting of the dam may be simplistic symbolism:it destroys the house,drowns the grandmother who represents a past ,a puritan past ,and allows the two lovers to sleep together in the girl's own bed! The last picture ,a car running across the smoking ruins makes sense,although the divorced woman might be a bourgeois rebel ,almost an oxymoron.
In its muffled atmosphere,"the virgin and the gypsy " is really a sleeper which should be rediscovered.
Like this?try these....
-Lady Chatterley's lover (same writer,several versions)
-the go-between (Losey)
-Tess (Polanski)
-Maurice (Ivory)
The bursting of the dam may be simplistic symbolism:it destroys the house,drowns the grandmother who represents a past ,a puritan past ,and allows the two lovers to sleep together in the girl's own bed! The last picture ,a car running across the smoking ruins makes sense,although the divorced woman might be a bourgeois rebel ,almost an oxymoron.
In its muffled atmosphere,"the virgin and the gypsy " is really a sleeper which should be rediscovered.
Like this?try these....
-Lady Chatterley's lover (same writer,several versions)
-the go-between (Losey)
-Tess (Polanski)
-Maurice (Ivory)