The Age of Innocence 4K 1993 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

The romantic story shows the splendor and hypocrisy of the high society of the late 70s of the 19th century. Newland Archer is a prosperous lawyer who deep down desires real passion in his mundane existence. His engagement to the lovely and well-meaning May Welland promises him a complacent and peaceful life.

But when cousin May returns to New York after a public scandal, Newland finds himself caught in the web of her secret power and ineffable beauty. Now he is forced to choose between the world he knows and the world he could only dream of.

Review 4K Movie

The attitude to this little-known work by Martin Scorsese is usually respectful - condescending. Of course, the movie is of high quality, but you don't have to watch it. Except as aesthetic piggishness such an approach can not be called. “The Age of Innocence” - meticulous adaptation of the novel by Edith Wharton, surpassed in its artistic component of quality literary basis. Wharton is to Americans what Jane Austen is to the British. Only she is many times less famous and her books are more psychological. But “The Age of Innocence” will never see the laurels of “Pride and Prejudice” in the form of a horde of snotty dreamy young ladies. The heroes of Wharton's novel are not so pure and beautiful in spirit, so as not to make mistakes in the choice and get a prize at the finish line of the relay race of life. In fact, it is a polemic with Austen's pious style and ideology. Wharton soberly looks at things and does not cover the vices of virtue “literary” love longing, and cynical calculation caring reflection.

Martin Scorsese does not often look beyond the limits of modernity, but even less often he goes beyond the New York neighborhoods in which he grew up and which he praises from film to film. Mostly making brutal male movies, the director stayed true to himself this time, adapting a melodrama for girls into a drama for boys. The uncharacteristic material was born, neatly, between the toughest pictures of the maestro (“Cape Fear” and “Casino”), becoming an inspiring outlet of leisurely and charming. To the detailed recreation of the life of the New York elite of the nineteenth century Scorsese approached as a scientist looking at the ethical metamorphosis and ritual reticence of the characters of the classic work, as if exploring a wild African tribe. The distancedness is also manifested in the perfection of the camerawork, the coolness of the tones referring to the works of Visconti, Renoir and Ophüls. The director himself played an episodic role of a photographer, as if winking behind the screen of a massive apparatus of a magic lantern and fixing black-and-white prints of innocence passing into the past, the era of which remained a dreamlike phantom for the next generations.

Scorsese's stunning costume work is as good as the best crime masterpieces of the director's contemporary era, in which there is no hint of the illusion of salutary regret for lost illusions. The city has changed, but the residents of Five Corners continue to grapple with the same problems of inner ethics as they did a hundred years ago...as did the people of the world. For Scorsese, the New York of the past is more generalized and universal. It doesn't have the familiar “dirty streets” where “cab drivers” go crazy and “nice guys” embody the law. The city is typical and beautiful, like the unfamiliar, the unknown that existed before you and remains after.

The Age of Innocence is the age of love, where convention and ostentatious propriety have no place. This era never existed. It was written by Edith Wharton. It was captured by Martin Scorsese.