Lost in Criterion

David Lean's 1945 adaptation of a Noel Coward play brings a great film, if you can get past the fact that it's about the emotional struggles of the bourgeois. I kid! Pat and I both loved Brief Encounter. It's a perfectly crafted story of an affair that leaves us emotionally drained and loving it.

Chasing Amy is the story of a man who falls in love with a lesbian and is a terrible person. It doesn't hold up to time, but maybe it was still important at some point.

Pat and I actually understand Agnes Varda this week.

In this episode Pat gets annoyed by the main character's angst, and I spend as much energy as I can trying to get him to care. We have more Agnes Varda coming up in the Collection, including next week's Vagabond, and well deserved, too, considering she pretty much started the French New Wave. Hopefully Pat can get into the others.

In this week's episode we watch a French musical comedy and discuss the metaphorical value of Pat's underwear. Le Million (1931) is director Rene Clair's second sound film, a medium he at first regarded as "an unnatural creation" apparently believing that sound would do nothing but diminish the quality of story telling on the big screen, an opinion that I can not imagine anyone actually having ever.

Ingmar Bergman's 1975 adaptation of the classic Mozart comedic opera is, as Pat repeatedly says in these week's episode, "wonderful!"

This is a highly controversial film to say the least, and still one that doesn't come up positively in conversation's about Jesus films in conservative circles. A Christianity Today article on the top 10 Jesus films even lists Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew - a film in which Jesus is a brooding, angry revolutionary made by a Marxist, atheist – while only making a passive negative comment about the “heresy” that is The Last Temptation.

We hit up our last Jean Cocteau film this week to finish off his trilogy of artistic non-statements with the 1959 swan song Testament of Orpheus. Pat and I are so done with Cocteau and his insistence that nothing he does has meaning even while he forces metaphor and symbolism into every nook and cranny of his work. This one features Cocteau himself as protagonist being berated by supernatural beings for asking "Why?"

We finally find a Cocteau film we can sit through.

Jean Cocteau's exploration of art leaves Lost in Criterion with feelings.