Enjoy Life

Summer DVDs

Fancy a night in front of the box? Simon Evans has some great ideas from the latest batch of home entertainment releases

The Music Lovers

(BFI, Blu-ray)

Ken Russell first made his name directing documentaries for the old Monitor arts television programme, and had a particular penchant for making short, impressionistic films about composers, of which his study of Elgar was especially highly regarded.

When Russell started making feature films he continued exploring the lives of the great composers, and the larger canvass of cinema allowed him to indulge his visual romanticism to the full, sometimes resulting in passages of sublime beauty but also scenes of wanton excess, especially in later films like Mahler and Lisztomania.

Thankfully Russell was able to keep his grandiose impulses reasonably under control for The Music Lovers, an exploration of the later years of Tchaikovsky, which came the year after his 1969 adaptation of DH Lawrence’s Women In Love had picked up four Oscar nominations.

Fascinated by Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality, and the fear its exposure had on his life and music, Russell plays fast and lose with timelines and character, injecting wonderfully realised fantasy sequences and, for the time, risqué sexual scenes, some involving the ever fearless Glenda Jackson, who plays Tchaikovsky’s doomed nymphomaniac wife.

Russell also allows Tchaikovsky’s wonderful music to illuminate many of the scenes, with dialogue cut to a minimum and the narrative played out in flashbacks and dream sequences which give the director’s imagination full rein.

Extras for this high definition edition of the film include a fascinating short film in which Russell’s son looks back at his father’s work and recalls his own appearance in The Music Lovers and an in-depth interview with Music Lovers screenwriter, and long-time Ken Russell collaborator, Melvyn Bragg, recorded in 1988. 

Army of Shadows

(StudioCanal, DVD and Blu-ray)

Based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, as well as the director Jean-Pierre Melville’s own experiences during the Second World War as a member of the French Resistance, this powerful film was not well received in France when released in 1969. The country was still in the grip of the revolutionary ferment of the year before and the film’s perceived glorification of President Charles De Gaulle, who had put down the 1968 May uprising, did not win it favour with leftist critics. It also did not help that France was in the grip of the Algerian War, and glorification of the Resistance was now taboo.

But quality will always win over petty censorship, and when the film was finally released in Britain, in the late Seventies, it was warmly received. It would be another 30 years, however, until what is now regarded as masterpiece of French cinema was seen in the United States. This year the film is finally being honoured in its native country, with a special screening at the Cannes Film Festival.

Army of Shadows stars some of the greats of French cinema, including Simone Signoret, Lino Ventura and Paul Meurisse and its story of the trials, tribulations and betrayals of a group of Resistance fighters is made all the more effective by its adoption of a minimalist approach more usually associated with gangster movies. Extras include a documentary Army of Shadows, The Hidden Side of The Story.

May December

(Dazzler Media, Blu-ray and DVD)

Right from his earliest films, which included the life story of Karen Carpenter told using Barbie dolls, the director Todd Haynes has not been afraid of upending expectations or venturing into dark territory. This film is no exception, a comedy that also succeeds in creating a sense of unease through jarring, but intentional, tonal shifts that keep the audience on their toes.

Set in Savannah, Georgie, the film centres on a research trip taken by a Hollywood actress, Elizabeth Berry (played by Natalie Portman) for a new role she has taken on, that of Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) who, back in the Nineties, earned brief notoriety as a 36-year-old mother of two taking up with a 13-year-old boy, Joe. She was sent to prison, had Joe’s baby behind bars, and, when she was released, they married.

When Elizabeth visits, the couple are still together, and have one child at college and two about to graduate from High School but, beneath the surface, all does not seem right; Gracie is controlling but constantly on edge, while Joe, now 36, is an innocent man-child obsessed with breeding rare butterflies and then setting them free, not the most subtle of metaphors but evocative of how he appears trapped in this strange relationship.

Elizabeth also has issues; at once immersed in the character of Gracie and yet strangely disconnected, a sequence where she explains the choreography of sex scenes to a group of high school children is one of many designed to make us inwardly squirm. That, however, is part of the charm of the film. It’s an oddity, but a curiously engaging one.

The Bells Go Down

(StudioCanal, Blu-ray and DVD)

Released in 1943, this Ealing production starred a young James Mason, future Doctor Who William Hartnell and music hall comedian Tommy Trinder in a fascinating portrait of London County Council’s Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) and its vital work during The Blitz.

Using genuine footage of the destruction that rained down on the capital from August 1939 until September 1940, memories still raw in the minds of Londoners, it was released around the same time as Humphrey Jennings’ landmark documentary Fires Were Started, to which it is in some ways a companion piece (Fires Were Started is one of the extras included on this excellent new release).

The film centres on the personal rivalries between a bunch of new recruits to the AFS and the professional firemen left to knock them into shape, all of which falls away when confronted with the nightly challenges and terrors presented by the German bombardment.

Newly restored, this new addition to StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics Collection features, in addition to the Jennings documentary, a 1939 film about the AFS and a Tommy Trinder short, Save Your Shillings and Smile.

Also available:

The recently departed Donald Sutherland stars in A Dry White Season (BFI), the landmark 1989 film that displayed to devastating effect the injustice and inhumanity of Apartheid-era South Africa just as that regime was starting to disintegrate. Newly available on Blu-ray, the film also stars Janet Suzman, Susan Sarandon and Marlon Brando, whose role as a campaigning lawyer won him an Oscar nomination. The film is also notable for being the first Hollywood film to be directed by a black woman, Euzhan Paicy…

Heavenly Pursuits (BFI, Blu-ray) is a charming 1986 Scottish comedy starring Tom Conti and Helen Mirren and is in similar vein to Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero and Gregory’s Girl, as a school pursues canonisation of the saint it is named after, and little miracles start to occur…

Back To Black (StudioCanal, Blu-ray and DVD) is a vividly told biopic of the doomed pop star Amy Winehouse, with Marisa Abela giving a remarkable performance as Amy, and, appropriately enough, Series 9 is the last season of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s brilliant horror/mystery anthology series Inside No 9 (BBC, DVD). It’s the strongest collection of stories to date with a finale to savour and the DVD features a making-of documentary and interview with Reece and Steve…

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