It’s been years since I’ve perused Blu-rays from the gold standard of art-house cinema, the Criterion Collection. With diverse and exciting titles continuing apace from this vital distributor, it seemed high time to revisit its ever-expanding catalog. These three new summer releases, all loaded with generous bonus features, offer a welcome return.
Venice has never received a stronger travelogue than David Lean’s Summertime ($31.96 BD, $23.96 DVD), a romantic roundelay that captures the city in all of its storied bustle, historical heft and sun-dappled beauty. Shooting on location at a time (1955) when studio photography still dominated, the director and his marvelous cinematographer, Jack Hildyard, luxuriate in every immersive sight and sound, often deploying the richness of deep-focus lenses: the vaporetti and gondolas cruising the canals, the frescoed buildings topped with gargoyles, the wrought-iron gates and lush foliage and singular sunsets, the symphonies in the streets and the arias echoing from windows.
It all makes for a nearly overwhelming change of scenery for Katharine Hepburn’s Jane Hudson, spinsterish secretary from Akron, Ohio, who is traveling alone to the northeastern Italian city for the first time. “I’m the independent type, always have been,” she informs the operator of her hotel, in a statement that summarizes Hepburn’s broader cinematic persona. That trademark self-sufficiency will be tested in this most romantic of locales, spurring a transient romance with Renato de Rossi, a sort-of-married antiques dealer (Rossano Brazzi) who has an “arrangement” with his spouse.
The smart and insightful script, co-written with Lean from a play by Arthur Laurents, doesn’t so much advocate for Renato’s more liberal attitude toward sex as much as it allows for the expansion of cultural worldviews. (“When in Venice …”) It has plenty to say about puncturing one’s expectations and assumptions, withholding judgment and embracing new ideas rather than clinging to traditions. Hepburn communicates all of this in a performance of deep feeling and dynamic range, easily ranking among her finest work.
But it’s the visuals I’ll remember most. Chafing against the plot-driven aesthetics of the classic Hollywood paradigm, Lean paces his movie so leisurely that by halfway through the film, Brazzi has barely entered the picture, and narrative thrust has been all but disregarded. Venice is as much a character as the two leads, and we are invited to savor its beauty. If ever a film deserved its Technicolor treatment, it’s this one, and thanks to Criterion’s vivid transfer, it’s never looked better.
Rouge ($31.96 BD, $23.96 DVD), the third feature (1987) from Hong Kong auteur Stanley Kwan, is characteristically flush with the director’s trancelike ambience, nuanced mise-en-scène and transportive use of color. The story is split between two time periods. In the opulent teahouses of the 1930s, Chan Cheng-Pang (Leslie Cheung), a member of the city’s aristocracy, strikes up a forbidden romance with an alluring courtesan named Fleur (Anita Mui) that supposedly ends in a double suicide. Fifty-three years later, the ghost of Fleur, looking pale as a porcelain doll but otherwise solid in form and not a day over 30, appears in the office of newspaper editor Yuen (Alex Man) to place an ad seeking the lost spirit of Chan Cheng-Pang. Yuen takes the penniless but glamorous vagabond home, despite the initial objections of his disbelieving girlfriend Shu-Hsien (Irene Wan).
Rouge feels like a transitional film for Kwan, a stepping-stone to his groundbreaking deconstruction of the biopic, Center Stage, few years later. By contrast, Rouge feels less assured of itself. The action can feel perched between tragedy and farce — it’s almost zany at times — and I’m not sure the humor is always intentional. Yet, particularly in the 1930s flashbacks, the film is a showcase for the director’s sumptuous visual eye. There is richness and cohesion in every decorous frame, from the costumes to the wallpaper to the stained-glass art. The artifice is this cosseted life is as intoxicating as the opium its doomed lovers ingest in their escapes from the prying eyes of Hong Kong’s caste society.
Modern Hong Kong offers little in the way of such ravishing visuals. As much as Kwan tells the story of love’s permutations across two couplings divided by time, he likewise tracks the city’s various evolutions and devolutions. Though the culture has progressed toward a more equitable and egalitarian spirit — the roles of “gentry” and “prostitute” would not be so proscribed as in 1934, and Fleur and Chan Cheng-Pang would be able to pursue a relationship freely — Rouge is also alive to what Hong Kong has lost, as glamorous palaces have mutated into 7-Elevens. The most sorrowful aspect of Rouge is that Fleur seems out of time in both eras, a beautiful flower wilted by societal neglect.
A 1995 neo-noir of the highest order, Carl Franklin’s Walter Mosley adaptation Devil in a Blue Dress ($39.96 BD + 4K HD, $31.96 BD) is as lyrical as it is volatile. Denzel Washington plays Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, World War II veteran and newly unemployed machinist in 1948 Los Angeles who, staring down the barrel of unpaid bills, accepts a proposition from shady white man DeWitt Albright (Tom Sizemore) despite his Spidey Sense alerting him otherwise. The task is deceptively simple: Locate a missing white woman who until recently had been shacking up with an L.A. mayoral candidate. Rawlins is perfect for the job, Albright suggests, because the dame in question has an attraction to melanin, or as Albright eloquently puts it, “she likes jazz, pigs’ feet and dark meat.”
Devil in a Blue Dress is filled with such uncouth double entendres, which pair nicely with Rawlins’ pulpy voice-over narration and Jennifer Beals’ sultry, doe-eyed femme fatale. Franklin gloriously parades such genre tropes, already victims of parody by 1995, as if freshly unearthing them, and he effectively injects them with new life.
This is a plotty movie, as Rawlins’ investigation finds him ensnared in a citywide conspiracy that entangles the police, gangsters, crooked politicians and Rawlins’ own sexual dalliances. But more memorable than the dizzying cast of characters — including a crackerjack performance from an emerging Don Cheadle, as Rawlins’ trigger-happy associate — is Franklin’s presentation of the endemic, ambient bigotry of segregated Los Angeles.
Sometimes this perpetual threat is in the foreground, as when Rawlins is manhandled by a pair of brutal white cops, or casually assaulted by a clutch of racist youths on the Malibu pier. But racism is at the core of everything in Devil in a Blue Dress, from Rawlins’ employment woes to a secret harbored by Beals’ damsel on the run — a cancer with which Mosley, Franklin and Washington appear to be all too familiar.