Love Unto Death / Life Is a Bed of Roses

The great director Alain Resnais—elder statesman of the French New Wave—continued making films practically up to the day he died in 2014 at the age of 91. This double feature presents remastered versions of two of his films from the early 1980s. Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983) combines drama, romance, fantasy, and musical elements to tell imaginative parallel stories of love. In the historical tale, a castle is built by an idealistic count (Ruggero Raimondi), who goes bankrupt while creating his utopian ideal for the woman he loves (Fanny Ardant). In the present-day story, the castle is the site of a teacher's symposium, where a straight-laced grade-school teacher (Sabine Azéma, Resnais's muse and, later, his wife) becomes the target of a romantic plot launched by an eccentric education maverick (Geraldine Chaplin). In between these temporal worlds, a fantasy of kings and dragons summoned by the children of the castle plays out, weaving a whimsical streak through the adult stories. Resnais reunited four of the costars for his very next film, Love Unto Death (1984), starring Pierre Arditi as an atheist archaeologist who comes back from the dead (or so he thinks) and becomes obsessed with his lover (Azéma). Ardant and Andre Dussollier, the couple's best friends, are ministers who argue with them about faith and religion. It's a Bergmanesque meditation on life, love, morality, and death—a more serious film that lacks the light touch of Roses, although both find Resnais playing with storytelling conventions and expectations. Extras include audio commentaries by film critics Wade Major and Andy Klein. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)