Love to death

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Movie
German title Love to death
Original title L'Amour à mort
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1984
length 92 minutes
Rod
Director Alain Resnais
script Jean Gruault
production Philippe Dussart
music Hans Werner Henze
camera Sacha Vierny
cut Jean-Pierre Besnard ,
Albert Jurgenson
occupation

Love to the death (original title: L'Amour à mort ) is a French drama directed by Alain Resnais from 1984.

action

During archaeological excavations in the south of France , the researcher Simon Roche met Elisabeth Sutter, who he liked. They fall in love and spend two happy months together. However, your happiness is short-lived. Simon has a sudden attack and is subsequently pronounced dead by a doctor. When Elisabeth is already giving in to pain and grief, Simon miraculously wakes up again.

However, he is no longer the same as he was before. His near death experience changed his outlook on life and love. He longs for the mysterious feeling of happiness that he felt in apparent death. Elisabeth is now afraid of losing him again and therefore wants to have him examined by a doctor, this time by a specialist. Simon refuses, however, to give in to her urge.

Although Elisabeth is an atheist , she eventually turns to her friends, the pastors Judith and Jérôme Martignac, and asks them for support. At first they cannot understand Elisabeth's fear, but try to give her emotional support with various beliefs on the subject of death. Judith also reveals to Elisabeth that she and Simon were lovers as teenagers and that out of youthful zeal they had decided to go to death together. But when they cut their wrists, they panicked and changed their minds. After this incident, they went their separate ways.

When Simon dies a second time and this time does not return, Elisabeth wants to follow him into death, which both Judith and Jérôme plunges into a deep crisis of meaning.

background

The shooting took place in Uzès in the south of France . Director Alain Resnais relied on clearly structured color symbols for his production. In all scenes that take place in rooms, there is at least one red or one black object, each representing one of the central themes of the film (love and death). In addition, after working with Muriel or Die Zeit der Wiederkehr (1963) , Resnais once again engaged the avant-garde composer Hans Werner Henze , who then wrote a chamber music piece for Love until Death , which consists of 52 abruptly interrupted sections. In the film, apart from the last take, it is only played between individual scenes when snowflake-like dust particles trickle down against a black background. After his successful film Das Leben ist ein Roman (1983), Resnais worked here again with the main actors Sabine Azéma , Pierre Arditi , André Dussollier and Fanny Ardant , whom he was later able to engage again for the film drama Mélo (1986).

Love to death premiered in France on September 5, 1984. In Germany, the film was first shown on television by arte on January 23, 2003 .

Reviews

The lexicon of international films described love to death as “a self-willed chamber play in scope format” and pointed out that the film was made “in a barren winter landscape and with preference for the colors red and black”. In the case of the “questions about happiness and pain, passion and loneliness, life and death” raised in the film, “a rigorous staging of the subject was shown”. For Cinema , the "reflection on life and death [...] was heavy fare". In the meantime, "Director Alain Resnais has given the viewer breaks with tricks such as fading in black" in order to make what had been seen up to then understandable. In summary, the film is " Ghost for Intellectuals".

Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote that Resnais' "haunting" film was "one of his most daring musical experiments." He was also "strongly played" and "certainly a matter close to the heart" of the director, but he was also "the kind of unsuccessful work" that casts a shadow over a number of successes.

Awards

At the 1985 César Awards , the film was nominated for the César in the categories of Best Film , Best Director , Best Cinematography , Best Film Music and Best Sound .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jonathan Rosenbaum: Love Unto Death on chicagoreader.com
  2. ↑ Love to death. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  3. ↑ cf. cinema.de
  4. ↑ “[T] his haunting […] feature […] is one of his boldest experiments in musical form. […] Powerfully acted, and certainly a personal and sincere project on Resnais' part, this is the kind of failure that to my mind towers over a good many inconsequential successes. " Jonathan Rosenbaum: Love Unto Death on chicagoreader.com