nisaba
I'm fiddling about in my livingroom at the moment, and I've got the TV on for some background sound (it's the middle of the night). There's an ancient B&W movie, British, made in the days of painful acting. I haven't been watching, but from what I gather there's a male called Johnny or Tommy, and a female called Maura who's a mermaid and whose ex-boyfriends keep washing up drowned.
My interest was half-attracted (not enough to turn around and actually look) by another female voice making a bad joke about how evil teabags are because she can't read people's tea-leaves any more. She offered Johnny a Tarot reading, and I thought here you go - a scriptwriter who doesn't know the difference between Tarot and tea-leaves! Still, I thought, if I notice any references to readings I might turn around and look at the deck.
Sure enough, I heard a reference to a reading, and I turned around. I was expecting it to be a Marseilles-style deck, as the RW couldn't have been more than twenty or thirty years old when the film was made, but nonetheless it was the RW deck. My TV is grainy sometimes and the film was in black and white and not of good quality so I'm not sure what the back design was. but the woman's clothes were a hotch-potch of Indian, Islamic, Egyptian and plain old theatrical-fortune-teller, and she wore simply *terrible* jewellery.
So I was expecting a hideous reading. Instead, it was rather melodramatic but surprisingly, not so bad. She laid out a Celtic Cross and I didn't get to see all the cards (I noticed the Tower right at the bottom, which she didn't mention), and some cards she actually treated really well. The Hanged Man, for instance, she didn't put any hanging connotations on it despite the fact that in the film you were given to understand he was in danger, but she referred to the mystical look of the facial expression, and how he was suspended between one world and the next. She did say that cards could bne read many different ways and were very deep, but then she went and ruined it all by pointing to The World, and saying that this card indicated his girlfriend was in very great danger!
Right up until that moment, even as a Tarotist, the reader had me in the palm of her hand. Oh, her melodrama was a bit rich and I hope I never get caught reading like that, but for a film of that era, it wasn't half bad.
Terrible film.
My interest was half-attracted (not enough to turn around and actually look) by another female voice making a bad joke about how evil teabags are because she can't read people's tea-leaves any more. She offered Johnny a Tarot reading, and I thought here you go - a scriptwriter who doesn't know the difference between Tarot and tea-leaves! Still, I thought, if I notice any references to readings I might turn around and look at the deck.
Sure enough, I heard a reference to a reading, and I turned around. I was expecting it to be a Marseilles-style deck, as the RW couldn't have been more than twenty or thirty years old when the film was made, but nonetheless it was the RW deck. My TV is grainy sometimes and the film was in black and white and not of good quality so I'm not sure what the back design was. but the woman's clothes were a hotch-potch of Indian, Islamic, Egyptian and plain old theatrical-fortune-teller, and she wore simply *terrible* jewellery.
So I was expecting a hideous reading. Instead, it was rather melodramatic but surprisingly, not so bad. She laid out a Celtic Cross and I didn't get to see all the cards (I noticed the Tower right at the bottom, which she didn't mention), and some cards she actually treated really well. The Hanged Man, for instance, she didn't put any hanging connotations on it despite the fact that in the film you were given to understand he was in danger, but she referred to the mystical look of the facial expression, and how he was suspended between one world and the next. She did say that cards could bne read many different ways and were very deep, but then she went and ruined it all by pointing to The World, and saying that this card indicated his girlfriend was in very great danger!
Right up until that moment, even as a Tarotist, the reader had me in the palm of her hand. Oh, her melodrama was a bit rich and I hope I never get caught reading like that, but for a film of that era, it wasn't half bad.
Terrible film.
