Like the director's similarly morose 1997 film, "The Myth of Fingerprints," "World Traveler" wants to be a contemporary "Five Easy Pieces," filtered through the 1960's alienation of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni.
"They" are ghosts, and according to Ms. Mercado's new memoir, "Grave's End Llewellyn Publicationsns), they include a morose 1950's man with a ducktail haircut, a violent flying hairclip, and an invisible force that pressed family members into their mattresses and occasionally stroked Ms. Mercado's breasts and thighs.
"A nation built on violence and morose vendettas today stands on shaky political and economic foundations," he writes.
Fully four-fifths of the French tell pollsters that they think "things are getting worse".But the opening quotation, seemingly so apt for morose France today, is not about that country at all.
She was in distinguished, if morose, company at last year's huge Freud retrospective, celebrating almost 70 years of painting, at Tate Britain.
I used to get morose over spending Christmas on my own That passed two to three years ago; now I am so tired [performing in pantomimes] that by Christmas Day, the last thing I need to do is make a fuss.
Antonioni's films of the 1950s included I Vinti (1952), a study of juvenile crime in which Fay Compton was improbably done to death on Banstead Common, La Signora senza Camelie (1953), about an unhappy actress, and the morose, fatalistic Il Grido (1957), about a factory worker's journey away from home, through various liaisons and back again, with Steve Cochran.
He won an Obie Award for his performance as the disturbed and morose Smerdyakov in a 1958 production of "The Brothers Karamazov".
Here she appears in a more commonplace role, the sexless clown ("Untitled," 2004) whose morose stare contrasts sharply with the flamboyance of her getup.
"How different writing is from thinking, even from planning what one is to write," Lerman wrote in a morose journal entry in 1978, after spending the day with Lincoln Kirstein and his wife and sister in Connecticut.
