EAST OF EDEN ***

3sur5 Awarded two Oscars, for best director Elia Kazan and Best Actor for James Dean, East of Eden has revealed this meteor classic cinema, a year before The Fury of Living and already a few months before his death. A topic implicitly East of Eden is the America of restless children emerging in the context of post-war. Sometimes they are rebels without a purpose, adulescents herd, but they are determined to free patterns that they believe and in large part due to the leaden or inhibit.
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America wakes up to the remote stream and the World shy output of the shell creates a youth whose greed is a natural echo, but finds even more helpless and disoriented. A youth breaking the ice but not knowing its place, swapping the chains of tradition against the lures of wandering, wandering and the conquest of his destiny. The story of East of Eden reflects the fulfillment of the American dream, revealing its limitations and contradictions with the basic values and past and James Dean embodies the original betrayal, to the detriment of Eldorado outdated and in favor of the golden age looks paradoxical (but liberating cynical).
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There is a lack in paradise. Family serenity, stability is an illusion, the structure itself is an illusion. James Dean hesitates between break with its referents and join his own who are too far away, he wavers between loyalty principle, but for tomorrow bucolic and morose, and reclaiming itself, but in advancing toward the unknown.
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His character seeks to shape an identity, a UFA. This is a contradiction rebel, seeking structure, certainty and love, but in spite of himself cornered choices unsolvable, he prefers chaos trying to find better and be saved. And James Dean seems destructive, impulsive, without goals, but he is undecided about its own nature, its function and meaning. Resourceful and restless in movement but doubting his own value, he wants to do his duty, and please also bring recognition and confidence, but he does not know which way to turn or what to build, especially since it is always tormented by the feeling of being bad, inadequate or failed.
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Those who have the desire to feed the novel film will report the story that crosses the screen. Indeed, for the purposes of filming, James Dean had to return to Los Angeles, a city he had left to begin his career in New York, and taking the distance with his father. Conflict with the latter was particularly the aspirations of James Dean and his desire to become an actor. Same dichotomy in the film: the conflict between moral views of the character of Raymond Massey and the desire for emancipation and an affirmation of the ideal character of James Dean. This reproduction of the rupture father / son has created a tough shoot, disturbed by the enmity between the two actors and the crises of the future icon.
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Overall Rating 66
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Page Allocine
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→ Enneagram: James Dean embodies a characteristic type 6 (intrepid, indecisive, attention to duty, loyalty, ambivalence rules), especially with the recurring issues that may be confused with the 4 (envy, revenge, jealousy, excitement drama)