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Perfect Strangers (2001)
Rear Window (1954)
REAR WINDOW (1954)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock / Starring Grace Kelly and James Stewart.
François Truffaut: I imagine the story appealed to you primarily because it represented a technical challenge: a whole film from the viewpoint of one man, and embodied in a single, large set.
Alfred Hitchcock: Absolutely. It was a possibility of doing a purely cinematic film. You have an immobilized man looking out. That's one part of the film. The second part shows what he sees and the third part how he reacts. The is actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea.
Truffaut, François. Hitchcock/Truffaut. Revised Edition. London: Faber and Faber, 2017. Print. Page 214.
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Perfect Strangers (2001)
Written-directed by Stephen Poliakoff / Starring Lindsay Duncan, Michael Gambon, Matthew Macfadyen, Toby Stephens.
“If you take any family and get them together, and get them to stay up long enough, the stories will come tumbling out, there are at least three great stories in any family…”
Small in number are the films and television series that I come back to time and time again in my mind. Perfect Strangers is one such series. Beautifully written and shot, it tells the story of “an elaborately organised reunion, held in a grand London hotel, Raymond (Michael Gambon), his wife Esther (Jill Baker) and their son Daniel (Matthew MacFadyen) are slowly drawn into their ancestors’ family tree. Meeting distant, and not so distant, relatives for the first time they begin to establish their positions within this eccentric and eclectic family.”