Dan Conley’s Writing Projects

Kieslowski figured out late in his career that audiences respond very powerfully to seeing attractive lonely people. As he explained in a letter to his friend Hanna Krall, when beautiful people are lonely, there’s an injustice to it that makes the suffering seem even more acute. Mrs. Chan and

Towards the end of this segment, that focuses on one event in Maria’s career at a publishing house, a character quotes Dante’s Inferno, but could very well be describing the experience of watching “Mirror” — Midway upon the journey of our life. I found myself within a forest dark

In an atmosphere so crowded and lacking in privacy, sexual affairs would seem impossible. But “In the Mood for Love” exists in a universe where they are common, but still require a level of discretion. Mrs. Chan works as much for her boss’s affairs as she does for her

Tarkovsky held one of the strangest rationales for religious faith that I’ve ever heard. He was born in the Soviet Union and his family was not religious. But he came to believe over time that cultures without religion suffer in their art, so he had faith because he thought

The movie begins with text. It’s a parable, of sorts, but Wong provides no context. Has he taken this mood-setting parable from another story? It goes like this (well, at least in the English subtitles:) “It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered to give him

In numerous interviews, Andrei Tarkovsky called “Mirror” a film about his mother. But should we believe him? By this I don’t mean that he’s lying to us. Rather, I think Tarkovsky is ignoring all of the pieces of “Mirror” he assembled through the years that don’t involve