Bitter Moon is a 1992 erotic romantic thriller film directed by Roman Polanski and starring Peter Coyote, Emmanuelle Seigner, Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas. The film's French title is Lunes de fiel (a pun on the French phrase "lune de miel", meaning "honeymoon"). It is based on the novel Lunes de fiel by the French author Pascal Bruckner, published in English as Evil Angels. The score was composed by Vangelis.
Bitter Moon
His story unfolds aboard an ocean liner, where an embittered husband, paralyzed and in a wheelchair, buttonholes a complete stranger and begins to tell him the story of his marriage. The stranger would like to escape, but cannot. For one thing he grows fascinated by the story. For another he is mesmerized by the man's wife, who has perfected that trick of looking a man boldly in the eye until, by looking away, he concedes sexual supremacy. Hour after hour, day after day, the sordid story unspools, and in flashbacks we see a romance that turns into a dangerous obsession.
It's an ugly ending... befitting, some would say, the final decadeof an ugly century. "You were just too greedy, baby, that was all," says Oscarbefore putting the 9 mm automatic in his mouth. You wince at his desperateexit, yet realize it was scripted by his muse, the bitter moon in red who gavehim the gun as a birthday present.
The soundtrack by Vangelis is excellent, is pure onomatopoeia withthe ocean, the moon, the bitter spirit that pervades this story of poisonedlove. But the film's power comes from its narrator.Peter Coyote moves through his role asif he is no mere fiction but rather an eloquent subject of cinemaverite. His resemblance to that well-known poetic undertaker Leonard Cohen(or even Pascal Bruckner, author of the novel) perhaps helps some of us suspendour disbelief... yet the fact remains that Coyote is utterly convincing asOscar, an American writer as horny as Henry Miller but without the humanism ofhis famous precursor.
Later during the Yuan Dynasty, another folk tale suggested rebel leaders distributed mooncakes to Han Chinese in the capital. Each of these cakes had within it a piece of paper with a message rallying them to stage an uprising against the Mongolian rulers during the Mid-Autumn Festival night.
Some insiders predict an increase in mooncake prices when purchasing demand picks up in September and bakeries pass on some of their increased raw material costs. Traditionally it has been a lucrative niche for the bakery industry, worth around Rmb20 billion annually ($2.9 billion). At the premium end of the market a box of six mooncakes can sell for $80 at The Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. (For more on mooncakes and their various regional fillings see WiC383.)
 38c6e68cf9