Lia's understated visual humour goes hand in hand with joyfully surreal verbal adventures, during which snooty flamingos are reproached and squirrels are taught to beatbox.
While the material isn't exactly groundbreaking, the director/star's affinity with his actors and understated visual experimentation pay solid offbeat dividends.
With an understated visual style and perfectly paced narrative, Mr. Lee has created a portrait of a woman who has, by the end, become an extraordinary vision of human empathy.
As absorbing and replete with character and incident as a 19th-century novel, it also glows with understated visual intensity and moves with the sweep and patience of a symphony.
The tiny patio, discreetly set off from the sidewalk by a curtain of small trees, seemed as enticing as ever, and the coolly decorated dining rooms, opening onto a bamboo-lined terrace in back, exuded an understated visual confidence.
Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B" rating and Owen Gleiberman praised Hardwicke's direction: "She has reconjured Meyer's novel as a cloudburst mood piece filled with stormy skies, rippling hormones, and understated visual effects".
Slight noises might annoy me, but they also enrich the visual plane.
But the distraction element is far less, since the titles and images are on the same visual plane.
"We wanted to create something that felt vast, and broke the standard visual plane," Beacon explains.
It's a striking visual: A plane is a flying data-generating machine.
To see a single Rohmer film is never sufficient: you can be charmed or irritated -- sometimes both at once -- but his sly sense of narrative rhythm and the understated elegance of his visual style may not be altogether evident.
