Mr. Assayas's piercing awareness that the past is, as he put it, "unreachable" keeps sentimentality at bay, but it accounts for the film's overwhelming melancholy.
He uses them to, among other things, identify a serial killer, but his heroics can't erase his overwhelming melancholy, much of it stemming from the fact that his old girlfriend, heartbreakingly played by Brooke Adams, has married someone else during his hospitalization.
An overwhelming sense of melancholy pervaded the stalls; the dealers seemed resigned to it, as if it were just another occupational hazard, like frostbite.
What these films have in common is an overwhelming sense of melancholy, as if their makers needed to assure the public that sex, like money, cannot buy happiness.
Sometimes, looking down at the pitiful one before him, the judge will be struck with an almost overwhelming sense of melancholy.
Even the famous cherry blossom symbolised passing time and human transience, and the overwhelming sense of melancholy was reinforced by Ninagawa's repeated use of the Fauré Requiem and the Samuel Barber Adagio for Strings.
Still, overwhelming is overwhelming.
He is probably best known through the oeuvre of the director Béla Tarr, who has collaborated with him on several movies, including "Damnation," "Werckmeister Harmonies" (Tarr's version of "The Melancholy of Resistance"), and the vast, overwhelming "Sátántangó," which runs to more than seven hours.
Grant isn't Tyler Brûlé, laconically assessing the thread count in his hotel's Egyptian cotton sheets as his audience wonders whether they would be any use for throttling him; he's bug-eyed and irresistible, a madcap, Mephistophelean guide whose charm is so overwhelming that you might almost miss the note of melancholy that underpins it.
The movie has a couple of Bergman howlers (such as a noisy owl that presages doom), but its evocation of first love and the long disillusion that follows is possibly without equal in movies, and the relief from melancholy — through dancing, theatre, the masks that reveal the self — builds into an overwhelming accession of bliss.
"A Book of Secrets" is a book of magic, a sleight of hand by a master conjurer singing his swan song, sweetly, softly, with piercing wit and overwhelming compassion, his poetry in prose evoking a time past, with all its outrageous obsessions, its illegal passions, its melancholy perfume.
