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MovieMail's Review
Containing Life is a Bed of Roses (1983), Love Unto Death (1984), Mélo (1986), and I Want to Go Home (1989), this collection confirms, says David Parkinson, that the only thing to expect from a Resnais film is the unexpected.
Alain Resnais rivals Jean-Luc Godard as the most challenging film-maker of the New Wave era. Complex, uncompromising and mischievously controlled, his work is both cinematic and literary, acerbic and compassionate, and no one else could have produced the four films in this mid-80s selection.
A treatise on individuality, imposition and imagination, Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983) is a tripartite fantasy that slips between the 1910s and the present to explore the attainment of happiness. With characters occasionally bursting into song, this offers a very different insight into life-changing experiences to Love Unto Death (1984), an exacting exercise in dualism that sees Lutheran clerics André Dussollier and Fanny Ardant attempt to revise atheists Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azéma's attitudes to existence and the afterlife.
Using compositions by Hans Werner Henze as contemplative entr'actes, Resnais refuses to provide easy answers to the anguished questions raised in the sombre meditations. But he succeeds in making philosophical speculation seem visually dynamic by employing a form of filmic theatricality that is more pronounced in Mélo (1986), as Resnais utilises enclosed sets, stage lighting and interval curtains to distance the viewer from action that chronicles Sabine Azéma's intensifying feelings for womanising violinist André Dussollier, after husband Pierre Arditi invites him to dinner. Once again exploring the links between love and death, this is a superbly played boulevard drama whose emotionality is reinforced by the long takes and the meticulously designed mise-en-scène.
By contrast, I Want to Go Home (1989) is something of a curio, as Resnais ventures into territory more usually associated with Robert Altman and Woody Allen. However, cartoonist Adolph Green's Parisian sojourn with embarrassed daughter Laura Benson is not without its moments, most notably the animated interventions of Hep Cat and his companion Sally and a costume ball sequence that includes Sorbonne academic Gérard Depardieu dressed as Popeye. Confirming that the only thing to expect from a Resnais picture is the unexpected, this is a teasing sketch on artistic value and middlebrow pretension that just about surmounts its transatlantic tribulations.
Contains I Want to Go Home (1989), Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983), Love Unto Death and Melo (1986), four classic films from one of the masters of the French new wave.
In I Want to Go Home, a cantankerous American cartoonist visits his daughter in Paris, with disastrous results. Melo is set in Paris in the 1920s, where a concert violinist falls in love with a young flapper. In Love Unto Death, a young couple are forced to come to terms with death, while Life is a Bed of Roses (1983) sees three intertwined stories take place around a spectacular castle in the Ardennes forest.
