Life is a Bed of Roses
By Cyril Pearl -- Video Business, 2/18/2008
To celebrate the Feb. 12 DVD release of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 40th Anniversary Edition, Sony held a film screening at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on Feb. 11.
The stars of The Jane Austen Book Club greeted fans at Barnes & Noble at The Grove in Los Angeles on Feb. 5.
Warner Home Video launched a retail event to celebrate it's 85th anniversary with a party on the studio's lot on Feb. 5.
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KIMSTIM/KINO
Street: Feb. 19
Prebook: now
>A 1984 non-linear musical fantasy from well-known French provocateur Alain Resnais.
French auteur Alain Resnais’s colorful 1983 concoction is a musical fantasy that bounces around three parallel stories that take place in and around a fantastical castle in a forest-covered Ardennes countryside over the course of 60 years. (Does it already sound intimidating?) Cavorting through the non-linear story are a turn-of-the-century Count (Ruggero Raimondi), who builds the castle—a “Temple of Happiness”—as a Utopian haven for he and his society friends, and Livia (Fanny Ardant), the lovely lady whom the Count loves, though the love is not reciprocated. World War I and a mysterious elixir that makes people forget the past and become “re-born” also figure into the story, which pokes some intellectual fun at intellectuals (naturally), fantasy, idealism and musicals.
Shelf Talk: Though he never matched the popularity that he attained in the ’50s and ’60s with such arthouse classics as Night and Fog (1955), Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and Muriel (1963), Alain Resnais remains a challenging, relevant and, most importantly, active filmmaker. Along with Life is a Bed of Roses, Kimstim/Kino is issuing three other seldom-seen ’80s entries by Resnais—Love Unto Death (1984), Melo (1986) and I Want to Go Home (1989) with Gerard Depardieu and Linda Lavin—and Francophiles and other international cinema fans who’ve been following the auteur for nearly half a century are sure to be interested in the films they probably missed in theaters. Also, Resnais’s landmark Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is currently making the rounds at revival houses around the country, so the filmmaker’s name is being bantered about by cinephiles more than usual.
Musical, color, PG (mature themes), 110 min., DVD $29.95, French with English subtitles
Extras: featurette
Director: Alain Resnais
First Run: L, Nov. 1984, <$1 mil.