"Girl with Green Eyes" is a coming-of-age story - a nice Catholic girl has an affair with a much older man and morphs from an ugly duckling into a worldly young woman. It is set in a society which harshly condemns such things, to the point where a young woman's life is not really her own, but the property of family and Church. Shades of "The Magdalene Sisters".
Rita Tushingham plays the girl, who imagines she's good and innocent, but who's unaware of the guile and jealousy lurking inside herself. She's looking, I think, for a ticket out of her former life. Peter Finch is the man, middle-aged, separated from his wife and kid. The last thing he wants is an emotional entanglement to send his life off balance. He's protective of his privacy and tends to be a tad arch and patronizing. Sometimes he finds the girl rather juvenile. I found it interesting that the upper-crust society he's entrenched in also condemns this May-December romance, only it does so, not with pronouncements about sin, but with winks and whispers.
This movie is set in Ireland, and the moody, evocative black-and-white photography is gorgeous. It is crisp with a full palate of greys. The images were so palpable I wanted to reach out and touch the screen. The camera moves like a feather. The scene, near the end, where the girl is on the boat leaving Dublin, and the shore recedes further and further away, is a beautiful metaphor, describing the passage from one chapter of the girl's life to another.
Rita Tushingham plays the girl, who imagines she's good and innocent, but who's unaware of the guile and jealousy lurking inside herself. She's looking, I think, for a ticket out of her former life. Peter Finch is the man, middle-aged, separated from his wife and kid. The last thing he wants is an emotional entanglement to send his life off balance. He's protective of his privacy and tends to be a tad arch and patronizing. Sometimes he finds the girl rather juvenile. I found it interesting that the upper-crust society he's entrenched in also condemns this May-December romance, only it does so, not with pronouncements about sin, but with winks and whispers.
This movie is set in Ireland, and the moody, evocative black-and-white photography is gorgeous. It is crisp with a full palate of greys. The images were so palpable I wanted to reach out and touch the screen. The camera moves like a feather. The scene, near the end, where the girl is on the boat leaving Dublin, and the shore recedes further and further away, is a beautiful metaphor, describing the passage from one chapter of the girl's life to another.