The Lovers
Josh Hartnett stars as a marine archeologist who falls into a coma following an undersea accident and awakens in a past life (or is it a dream?). He’s now an 18th century Englishman in India, engaged in romance and adventure with a mystic warrior woman (Indian cinema star Bipashu Basu). In this production by director Roland Joffe (The Killing Fields), India is bathed in idyllic exoticism in a melodramatic hybrid of Hollywood and Bollywood.
Love Unto Death / Life is a Bed of Roses
Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad are considered classics of European art house. In later years, the French New Wave director continued to make challenging films. In the ironically titled Life is a Bed of Roses (1983), past and present dissolve and merge within the confines of a single setting. Love Unto Death (1984), shot in startlingly short takes, is a meditation on death following the apparent resurrection of its protagonist.
Timbuktu
Beautiful and moving, the Oscar-nominated film by Mauritania’s Abderrahmane Sissako tells stories from the occupation of an ancient African community by ISIS allies. The dialogue rises to poetry, the leisurely rhythm echoing life at the rim of the Sahara and the story is replete with ironies. The Islamist fanatics ban soccer but follow the World Cup. Many of these transnational rabbles are forced to communicate with each other in English, the language of infidels.
