Jessa Crispin

Wallace Shawn’s Designated Mourner feels like watching the news

Plus: a refreshing new film podcast from Mubi that tries to understand why specific stories are a runaway success

Mike Nichols as the professor in David Hare's 1997 film adaptation of Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner. Image: Marka / Alamy Stock Photo 
issue 17 July 2021

Pity the aesthete, the flâneur and the opera-goer. Those who find the contents of their own heads so dull and mundane they must fill them instead with the fantastical inventions of our most extravagant lunatics. They have been locked out of the theatres and cinemas and public spaces that make them feel at their most alive and abandoned to the content programming of Netflix and whatever Tenet was supposed to be.

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