The center of the trilogy, "Orpheus," is perhaps the most problematic of Cocteau's films, simply because it attempts to simultaneously tell a story and comment on it -- a kind of cinema equivalent of a narrative and an essay.
But this is just more hamming, the narrative equivalent of shrugging your shoulders and gesticulating.
When she makes sharper observations, they are expressed in the narrative equivalent of bold-face type.
Somehow, through all the fractured frenzy of the piece, he found a connective thread, the musical equivalent of a narrative line.
Kennedy remains a sceptic: "Anything that's purely based on number crunching would give you the narrative equivalent of sausage stuffing".
At once a musical within a musical, a thriller, a backstage drama, and a romance, it is the narrative equivalent of a Dagwood sandwich, stuffed with relish and a lot of ham.
There is a spiritual patness, as it were, a tying up of the soul's loose ends, that can be twice as vulgar as its narrative equivalent; look at the very last scene of "Signs," and you will see what I mean.
Even if you feel that it would be retrograde for these stories to be drenched in sherbets, musks and ambers, you have to wonder what happened to the courtyards and souks and fountains in which they happen: they are the visual equivalent of the narrative's serpentine path.
This scenario overlaps with; although it is not totally equivalent to the narrative described in MS2 about the development of addiction in the e-age.
It fits snugly in the long list of easygoing nothings, the narrative equivalent of a Fruit Roll-Up, designed to be forgotten in as many minutes as it took to watch.
