Review: 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
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