Yet these movies are also shot through with a very adult melancholy, an awareness that life tends not to measure up to the glorious pictures in our minds.
For Mr. Langella's encounters with a glittering roster of famous names are often shot through with a haunting sense of melancholy, a sensitive awareness of the cruel exigencies of great public acclaim, which is almost always transitory.
As she's done in so many earlier books, Ms. Lively writes with an astringent blend of sympathy and detachment, emotional wisdom and satiric wit, and the result, here, is a Chekhovian tale that's entertaining, even funny on the surface, but ultimately melancholy in its awareness of time and lost opportunities, its characters' apprehension of mortality and the limits to their dreams.
Already the elements of this fastidious craftsman's style were locked in place: the awareness of landscapes, usually melancholy, the sense of people drifting through time and space, but held always under the tightest control, the persistence of vision.
"Shakespeare always denies his characters sleep, which produces both heightened awareness and a proneness to melancholy," said Mr. Branagh, whose extensive credits include a celebrated 1996 film performance of "Hamlet," a film he also directed.
Our sadness won't be of the searing kind, more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the happiness before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
Melancholy is "the sensation of a void of knowledge or an awareness of a void of sensation".
But the total effect of the passage depends upon the reader's awareness of Lolita's actual circumstances and Humbert's melancholy account of her "sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep".
His Prince of Sabina is an obviously earthbound philosopher, a man whose awareness of the transience of physical pleasure is the melancholy result of his keen lifelong appetite for it.
