Cohen Media to Release Two Remastered Alain Resnais Films on Blu-ray

The Cohen Media Group will release on Blu-ray two films from acclaimed director Alain Resnais: Life is a Bed of Roses (1983), starring Vittorio Gassman, Ruggero Raimondi, and Geraldine Chaplin, and Love Unto Death (1984), starring Sabine Azéma, Fanny Ardant, and Pierre Arditi. The two-disc set will be available for purchase on July 21.

Life is a Bed of Roses

Alain Resnais pays tribute to three influential French filmmakers Georges Melies, Marcel L Herbier and Eric Rohmer with this lighthearted film about happiness and the power of the imagination. Life Is a Bed of Roses is divided into three parallel narratives. The first section is set around the first decade of the twentieth century in the Ardennes, where Count Forbeck (Ruggero Raimondi) unveils his architect's designs for a utopian city. In a modern day mirroring of this story, a group of professors now inhabiting Forbeck's castle seek a new form of education through the use of the imagination, under the guidance of a guru named Guarini (Vittorio Gassman Big Deal on Madonna Street). The third segment depicts a Wagnerian fantasy landscape of kings and dragons, which arises from the imagination of the children of some of the professors at the school. With ingenuity and great craftsmanship, Resnais weaves together these three threads to make Life Is a Bed of Roses a compelling and entertaining mixture of drama, satire, comedy, fantasy and music.

Love Unto Death

In Uzès, a mysterious, austere town, four characters who live in seclusion have a simple yet superb life. It is the story of two couples. The first, Judith and Jérôme, have been living for ten years in deep, exalted mutual understanding. Both clerics, they have their own ideas on faith. Elisabeth and Simon are the other couple. Their love which is a few months old is shot through with a terrible, inescapable threat: that of their separation. Life and death, red and black, happiness and pain, passion and solitude come together in exaltation. She is illuminated by their mutual love. He is dark and tortured by a disturbing memory. This film goes beyond analysis, calling for an emotional approach. Like the passion which shines through it, it radiates violence, suffering, but above all, an immense hope, that of triumphant love.