This record of grinding frustration and fleeting tenderness, composed mainly of static long takes, plays out in a deadened, polyglot, pan-urban landscape of globalization's unfulfilled promise; instead of a world brought together, Tsai shows natives turned into aliens at home, who remain silent in every language.
He wrote the 7th Symphony in 1885 and filled it with the robust gestures, fleeting tenderness and the exaggerated dynamic contrasts we expect of Bruckner.
Spying on moments of fleeting, dangerous tenderness between Julia and Winston only adds to our sense of voyeurism and complicity.
In what must be one of the saddest romantic duets ever choreographed, two exhausted people who once loved each other remember how it felt and why, with fleeting, yielding tenderness.
Mr. March, by his personable nature, gives occasional fleeting glints of tenderness.
Despite Hamm's brutality towards his parents, he still inspires pathos through his flights of grandeur, his lugubrious grasp of loss and his fleeting moments of tenderness for Clov.
The care of those around them, a poignant instance, a fleeting moment of affection and myriad sediments of tenderness, these may coalesce in the mind of a new mother to chase away, like an industrious fan with a harsh yet invigorating breeze, all inappropriate thoughts and unpleasant feelings.
This is especially frustrating because Keret is capable of interludes of haunted tenderness, as in the fleeting little number called "One Kiss on the Mouth in Mombasa" or the more substantial "Himme," about a man with a troubled marriage whose father is expert at eulogizing "the old guard".
Needless to say, even with fleeting moments of black humor and tenderness, the movie has a running time you feel in your bones as the years pass and the day count (provided onscreen throughout) increases.
Like Proust, he pursues the "fleeting paradise" found in unexpected moments of tenderness.
Anyone who can combine cops, robbers and ballet rehearsals to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" is thinking at least in triplicate; and multiple viewings of "Esplanade" do not resolve the fleeting images of androgyny, isolation and grief that dot and cross its tendernesses and joys.
