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5 out of 8 people found the following review useful: An easy to understand film from renowned French Cinéaste Alain Resnais, 11 February 2008 Author: Lalit Rao (cpowerccc@yahoo.com) from Paris, France
Master cinéaste Alain Resnais likes to work with those actors who are a part of his family.In this film too we see Resnais' family members like Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azema, André Dussolier and Fanny Ardant dealing with serious themes like death,religion,suicide,love and their overall implications on our daily lives.The formal nature of relationship shared by these people is evident as even friends, they address each other using a formal you.In 1984,while making L'amour à mort,Resnais dealt with time,memory and space to unravel the mysteries of a fundamental question of human existence :Is love stronger than death ? It was 16 years ago in 1968 that Resnais made a somewhat similar film Je t'aime Je t'aime which was also about love and memories.Message of this film is loud and clear :true and deep love can even put science to shame as dead lovers regain their lost lives leaving doctors to care for their reputation.L'amour à mort is like a game which is not at all didactic.It is a film in which the musical score is in perfect tandem with its images.This is one of the reasons why this film can easily be grasped.
1 out of 1 people found the following review useful: Agape/Thanatos, 10 July 2009 Author: Polaris_DiB from United States
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Alain Resnais films are uncanny in the way that they aren't really edited for continuity, but instead the shot seems to finish right where a memory has edited. Love unto Death is at times a quiet existential drama and a roundly creative magical realist movie, and either way treats the audience to a whole new aspect of the Eros/Thanatos relationship... or perhaps creates a new relationship, that of Agape/Thanatos.The beginning is like a bizarre surrealist horror movie. A woman desperately runs around the house while a man lays dying in his bed--did she kill him, or what happened? Soon that tension is dissolved as a doctor arrives and pronounces him dead, but from there a newer, stranger drama begins: the man wakes up, and after being dead the woman and man fall in love to actually quite tragic consequences. Meanwhile, their friends, who are both priests, watch on and submit their own debate into the nature of love, faith, and devotion.Resnais always seems to have some device to make these sorts of narratives work, and what's so amazing about his films is that those devices always work. In this case, Resnais intercuts the scenes with shots of snow falling to an arousing orchestral score, which fades off and bleeds into the subsequent shots that continue the story. Trapped in this elegiac aside periodically, the film develops a rhythm not too unlike an epic poem, and I got strange flashbacks to Dante's Divine Comedy from this one, despite the lack of direct reference within the movie. Resnais is known as a very poetic filmmaker but this extends past just the cinepoem structure to something that forces a degree of introspection in the viewer, which has the possibility to bring to surface some odd recollections. Memory-narrative, Resnais creates.--PolarisDiB
Love you to death, 15 August 2009 Author: jotix100 from New York
In a solitary house in the country, a botanic researcher, Elisabeth, coming home happens to see her lover sprawled on the floor, by the bed. She cannot do anything to wake him up and calls a doctor, who proceeds to tell Elisabeth the man is dead. Imagine our surprise when moments later, Simon, refreshed and somewhat recuperated appears to her. Fortunately for the couple, the doctor made a mistake in his assessment.Alain Resnais' film is from the period where he was involved in more esoteric matters. Working with his frequent collaborator, Jean Gruault, he made a film that deals with the obsessions of Simon with death, and how he deals with it. Elisabeth, who loves Simon, wants him so, that even she decides to do whatever it takes to follow Simon to the beyond. The film is told in brief scenes interspersed by blackness, what one can interpret as a trip to the beyond among galaxies, or a trip during a dark night in the midst of a snow storm.Mr. Resnais was preoccupied by questions about theology that have no easy answers, as Simon is told by a couple of Protestant ministers, Judith and Jerome. In fact, Jerome offers a sarcastic advice to Elisabeth at a low point in her desperation over having lost Simon. "What if there is nothing?", he asks her. Elisabeth finds out about Judith own involvement with Simon, something she did not even suspect.The director brings back the four principals, Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi, Fanny Ardant, and Andre Dussolier together again. Having worked with them in the making of "La vie est un roman", must have impressed him to include them in his new film. The actors show great chemistry following Mr. Resnais orders in this enigmatic film. The film wants to make the viewer ponder on that ultimate moment of our lives.
1 out of 5 people found the following review useful: troubling but somewhere too long, 24 April 1999 Author: Sergei Dubin (dubin@aha.ru) from Moscow, Russia
Perfect cast for a few-person drama. Simon is dead but somehow resurrects from outside. What he had seen there is displayed in form of blank spots orchestrated to a magnificent score by German avant-garde composer Werner Henze. Simon is haunted by his death, comforted by support of death people he'd seen on the other side. His girlfriend tries to hold him to life but failing to, decides to follow him after his finally occurring death. Very touchy and moving, deeply psychological, but a bit slow and somewhere even boring.
8 out of 22 people found the following review useful: Love And Death And The Whole Damn Thing, 23 May 2004 Author: writers_reign
Resnais assembles four staples of his repertory company for a downbeat exploration of love, faith, death, call it what you will - or twelfth night.You need stamina to sit through a sub-Bergman philosophical tract that not only doesn't get anywhere but doesn't seem to WANT to get anywhere. You could argue that it's better to travel hopefully than to arrive and you could further argue that with fellow travellers of this quality - Sabine Azema, Andre Dussollier, Pierre Arditi, Fanny Ardant - it's not even bad to travel indefinitely and if you are one of those then this is the journey for you but a short break it's not. As is to be expected from such a stellar cast the acting is certainly out of the right bottle but frailer hearts may wish to exchange this bottle for the one with the skull and crossbones on the label long before half way. For olive lovers only. 7/10
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