Projeto Première Acessível: Extensão, Ensino e Pesquisa em Legendagem

Year: 1992
Director: Tom Kalin
Country of origin: United States

Shot in the hauntingly stylish manner of avant-garde advertising, the black-and-white “Swoon” is a tricky, unpredictable synthesis of the mannered and the real. Its posing flappers, floating archly past the camera in the film’s opening moments, bespeak a pointed artificiality, but the passion between Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb is urgent and real. The cruel decision to kill a schoolboy (who is actually a relative of one of the killers) is later seen as part of this same intoxicatingly romantic spell. “Killing Bobby Franks together would join Richard and me for life,” Nathan later says at his trial. Based on a real murder case, the film won Best Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival and Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Source: adapted from The New York Times.