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If most summer movies are designed to tease and please, there are always exceptions. We look at the serious side of recent summer fare on DVD.
Married Life:
This one started on the filmfest circuit a year ago, played in theatres and comes to DVD tomorrow. This is an adult film that crosses romantic comedy with noirish thriller while conjuring up the past as a psychological melodrama.
Beautifully acted and directed, Ira Sachs' meticulously crafted film concerns two primary couples whose lives are interlaced, with potentially dire consequences. The action begins in 1949 and moves slowly, carefully, so don't be breathless.
Chris Cooper is a hopeless romantic married to pragmatist Patricia Clarkson, but he has fallen in love with the younger, alluring Rachel McAdams. He also may be as much in love with love. His best friend is the cynical playboy portrayed by Pierce Brosnan. He falls hard for McAdams, too, while initially keeping his distance. An elaborate murder plot will drive the characters to their final destinations. This film is all about secrets, even in intimate relationships.
Writer-director Sachs deals with characters, not caricatures, and has a marvellous quartet of stars. Brosnan has ripened in his post-007 period while Cooper is always excellent, as is the redoubtable Clarkson. McAdams is the wild card but she plays her hand beautifully, both in body and spirit. So the elaborate games these people engage in are involving to us, even though Married Life is a study in behaviour and not emotion.
The DVD offers the film in widescreen-only with extras involving Sachs, but not, alas, his cast members. Sachs is an articulate filmmaker so his commentary is useful in understanding the paths his film took.
Equally insightful is the segment with three alternate endings. Each extends the time period of the story into the future (that is, the 1960s) and each ruins the bittersweet ending that does exist. The explanation of process and choice intrigues because it shows how art is both fragile and malleable.
The Band's Visit:
Perhaps no summer DVD release arrived with less fanfare and yet more heart and soul than this beguiling Israeli film. Eran Kolirin's little story with its big ideas is a serious comedy with a deceptively simple premise: An Egyptian police band arrives in Israel for a cross-cultural exchange.
At the airport, the band gets on the wrong bus and ends up in the wrong town, where the eight musicians are stranded for the night. Israelis take them in.
Melancholy and pure joy join hands throughout as the band leader, played by Sasson Gabai, interacts with an Israeli restaurateur, played by Ronit Elkabetz. His closed-in sadness meshes with her unabshed loneliness. Meanwhile, the other band members all engage in their own small stories with the locals.
The Jewish-Arab conflict is never discussed, although there are allusions. But the film is a profound statement on humanity because it shows how two groups of people can interact without rancor, with a touch of humour, with traces of passion and with an aching understanding of what binds us all as people.
As a DVD, The Band's Visit is widescreen only. The extras are not extensive but the making-of featurette, Making the Fairy Tale, allows writer-director Kolirin and his actors to illuminate this special gift to us all.
A selection of other serious summer fare new to DVD:
- Flight of the Red Balloon: Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao Hsien reworks French director Albert Lamorisse's classic 1956 short into a feature with Juliette Binoche n My Brother is an Only Child: Italian Danielle Luchetti's film obliges two feuding brothers to come to terms with their anger during the political unrest of the late 1960s n The Glittering Prizes: Tom Conti stars in this 1976 BBC mini-series about colleagues at Cambridge in the 1960s, when idealism clashed with reality n The Year my Parents Went on Vacation: Brazilian Cao Hamburger is left distraught when his political parents go underground in 1970, in another exploration of political unrest growing out of the turbulent '60s.