Love Unto Death Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Love Unto Death Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 20, 2015

Note: This film is currently available as part of the double feature Love Unto Death / Life Is a Bed of Roses.

Film Theory and/or Film History classes at the college level often introduce students to Alain Resnais with his iconic films Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, sometimes attempting to pigeonhole the noted auteur into the French New Wave, a categorization that doesn’t always “fit”. Even Resnais himself shied away from being lumped in with the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, not because of any animus or other dislike, but merely because Resnais’ own deconstructionist tendencies were distinctly his own, ones not shaped by any so-called “movement.” As is mentioned in one of the commentaries included in the new Cohen Film Collection of two of Resnais’ 1980s outings (filmed back to back, in fact, and with many of the same cast members participating), Resnais had come up through the French film industry for decades before really making his mark with Hiroshima mon amour in 1959 (dramatically speaking, after Resnais made waves in 1955 for his chilling documentary Night and Fog), and that history made him as aware of tradition as any of the nouvelle vague theorists and (ultimately) filmmakers. Resnais, like the iconoclasts who would come to be identified with the French New Wave, definitely wanted to react to that tradition, but his techniques, while at times dovetailing into some of the New Wave’s strategies, could be markedly different and almost maddeningly metaphysical. Resnais can therefore be a very tough nut to crack at times, as evidenced by the commentary on Love Unto Death where regular Cohen commentators Wade Major and Andy Klein rather sheepishly state they have only ephemeral ideas about what various things “mean” in the film. Neither Love Unto Death nor Life is a Bed of Roses present some of the thornier issues and concepts that Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad do, but each is a fascinating film in its own way, and both rather strangely forsake the somewhat surreal ambience of Resnais’ earlier films for something that approaches a fairy tale ethos at times.

While Life Is a Bed of Roses exploits an ambience that is, in at least one “panel” of its plot triptych, an outright fairy tale come to life a la Into the Woods, Love Unto Death is more like a post-modernist reinvention of a Grimm Brothers trek to the “dark side” of lore, in this case a startling resurrection of sorts that provides a central character a chance to literally experience life after death. The film begins with some panicked screaming on the part of Elisabeth Sutter (Sabine Azéma), though it’s not initially apparent just exactly what she’s so freaked out about. It ultimately turns out that she’s witnessed a kind of seizure on the part of her newish boyfriend Simon Roche (Pierre Arditi), and once the village physician, Dr. Rozier (Jean Dasté), arrives, Simon is pronounced dead. In just one of several almost mind boggling ellipses which Resnais presents as faits accomplis in the film, sometime later Simon traipses down the stairs as if nothing had happened.

Those who are fans of Resnais’ earlier works like the aforementioned Hiroshima mon amour or Last Year at Marienbad will not be at all surprised by the discursive route Resnais takes to unfold this tale, but even longtime Resnais aficionados may be momentarily confounded by the structure of Love Unto Death. The film plays out in a series of sometimes extremely brief (as in a few seconds) vignettes, vignettes which are then interspersed with interstitial shots of snow falling against a black background. The imagery is open to many interpretations, but there’s at least a subliminal connection between this film’s preoccupation with death and a wintry ambience repeatedly poking through the ostensible narrative.

Another couple named Jérôme and Judith Martignac (ministers, no less), played by André Dussollier and Fanny Ardant, soon figure into the story, but Resnais (as is his wont) doles out information in dribs and drabs, so that both backstory and the (eventually) interwoven relationships of this quartet take a while to be made clear. For a film with such an arresting premise, the screenplay by Jean Gruault is surprisingly unmetaphysical, at least quite a bit of the time, and there’s also a weirdly sanguine quality to everyone’s reaction that Simon has more or less pulled a Lazarus, and seemingly without any “outside interference”.

Resnais is typically almost willfully inscrutable, and that proclivity is certainly on display throughout Love Unto Death (as evidenced by the commentators’ repeated confessions that they really have little idea what various things “mean”). The film has an undeniably hallucinatory quality which makes it seem like some performance art piece from an almost Jungian subconscious. Within the rather outré mechanics of the plot, performances are surprisingly low key and realistic feeling, another somewhat odd dialectic that Resnais exploits to keep things feeling both grounded in the everyday while simultaneously indulging in the phantasmagorical.

Love Unto Death Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Love Unto Death is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Elements are perhaps in slightly better condition on this release than Life Is a Bed of Roses, with an absence of any problematic large scratches, but still quite a bit of minus density and dirt which crops up with fair regularity along the way. The overall look of this transfer is decidedly on the soft side, something that is exacerbated by a rather heavy grain field, to the diminishment of fine detail, especially in the many dimly lit sequences throughout the film. Several near black scenes that play out in darkness suffer from noticeable crush, with elements like dark hair becoming one with the shrouded backgrounds. Outdoor and/or brightly lit sequences fare the best, as should probably be expected, with a noticeable uptick in detail even when the image retains its gauzier tendencies. A couple of shorter scenes are lit rather floridly, including an intimate scene bathed completely in red, and those sequences have the least amount of fine detail.

Love Unto Death Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Love Unto Death features an LPCM 2.0 mono mix (in the original French) which capably supports the film's brief snippets of dialogue, along with the really interesting, almost gamelan inflected, score by Hans Werner Henze. Henze's cues are often on the bright side, with bell like dissonances resounding in higher frequencies, and the uncompressed audio renders everything precisely and with excellent clarity and no overly strident harshness. Dialogue is well prioritized, and fidelity remains very good on this problem free track.

Love Unto Death Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• 2014 Re-Release Trailer (1080p; 1:49)


• Feature Length Commentary by Wade Major and Andy Klein. These two are always a lot of fun to listen to, but they seem (perhaps understandably) slightly befuddled by a lot of what transpires in Love Unto Death.

Love Unto Death Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Love Unto Death posits a number of astounding plot points, not the least of which is Simon's unexplained resurrection, and then doles out information at an almost glacial pace (glacial being an especially apt term considering the ubiquity of the film's snow imagery). Does any of this make "sense" in a traditional way? Maybe, maybe not, but like a lot of Resnais' material, there's an element to this storytelling that simply circumvents the rational mind and appeals directly to some subliminal well of emotion and feeling. Intentionally episodic and therefore kind of disjointed feeling, Love Unto Death explores ideas of second chances and mortality in an oblique but compelling manner. Technical merits are generally very good, and Love Unto Death comes Recommended.