Love Unto Death / Life Is a Bed of Roses Blu-ray Double Feature Detailed
Posted June 19, 2015 03:41 PM by Webmaster
Cohen Media Group has detailed the Cohen Film Collection release of director Alain Resnais' Love Unto Death (1984) and Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983), which are being made available as part of a 2-film Blu-ray set. Both star César Award winner Fanny Ardant, and arrive on Blu-ray on July 21st.
As a leading member of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and '60s, Alain Resnais transformed cinema with such landmarks as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel. Continuing through the decades to expand the vocabulary of cinema, Resnais followed his acclaimed drama/documentary hybrid Mon Oncle d'Amerique with the thematically linked but tonally divergent Life Is a Bed of Roses and Love Unto Death.
In Life Is a Bed of Roses, Resnais pays tribute to three influential French filmmakers: Georges Méliès, Marcel L'Herbier and Eric Rohmer. The film interweaves three stories from different eras but all sharing the same location, the Ardennes Forest. In legendary times, the infant son of a murdered king grows up to slay a dragon, rescue a maiden and reclaim his kingdom. In 1914, a wealthy count announces his plan to build a magnificent castle for himself and the family he intends to have with the woman he loves, but the onset of World War I changes everything. In the 1980s, the count's dream castle has been turned into an institute dedicated to advancing educational techniques, where an array of delegates convene only to break off into ideological disputes. These stories, punctuated by episodes of song, come together in what Sight & Sound called "a delicious celebration of imaginative possibility and narrative cunning."
In Love Unto Death, Resnais again employs music (by Hans Werner Henze) in a unique way -- as a fifth character in an intense chamber piece centering on two couples. Simon, an archaeologist, and Elisabeth are deeply in love, but the sudden death and miraculous revival of Simon throws their life into turmoil. Eventually, Elisabeth turns to another couple, both ministers, to find meaning in her own deeply altered life.
Both films were written by frequent Resnais collaborator Jean Gruault (Oscar nominee for Mon Oncle d'Amerique) and share principal actors Fanny Ardant (the César-winning star of Francois Truffaut's The Woman Next Door and Confidentially Yours), André Dussollier (Eric Rohmer's Le Beau Mariage), Sabine Azéma (Bertrand Tavernier's Life and Nothing But) and Pierre Arditi (Roberto Rossellini's Blaise Pascal). Also in the casts are the renowned Vittorio Gassman, Geraldine Chaplin, Ruggero Raimondi and Jean Dasté.
Love Unto Death was nominated for five César Awards and a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Cineaste hailed it as a "masterpiece ... one of the most intelligent films ever made on the subject of love and death." Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum said the film "recalls certain efforts of Ingmar Bergman in both its austerity and morbidity." Life Is a Bed of Roses, nominated for two Césars, was called "a delicious celebration of imaginative possibility" by Cineaste, while TV Guide praised it as "a unique and funny film."
Special features include:
Life Is a Bed of Roses Audio Commentary with critics Wade Major and Andy Klein
Life Is a Bed of Roses Theatrical Re-release Trailer
Love Unto Death Audio Commentary with Major and Klein