Film: DVD Reviews

'A Woman' is playful tribute to musicals

'A Woman is a Woman'

($29.95, Criterion Collection)
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Jean-Luc Godard's third feature, 1961's "A Woman is a Woman," revels in self-reflexive artifice, winky Hollywood allusions and the creative emancipation of the French new wave. Painted in birthday-cake colors, this "neorealist musical" (Godard's words) gambols like a billy goat, here lunging into song, there talking about Godard's own "Breathless" and New Wave compatriot François Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano Player."

Below the artificial veneer saunters a light but heartfelt romantic dilemma. Anna Karina -- a stunning precursor to Uma Thurman, who wears flirty mystery like her azure eyeshadow -- plays a stripper disenchanted with her lover (Jean-Claude Brialy). She wants a baby; he doesn't. Meantime, Jean-Paul Belmondo (his sangfroid and cigarette from "Breathless" untouched) pesters Karina to be his. She cuts him off with a snippet of showtune. "I'd like to be in a musical comedy with Cyd Charisse ... and Gene Kelly," she trills on a Paris sidewalk. The song abruptly ends, a Technicolor reverie.

"Woman" hints at homage and pastiche, but skirts around studied designs with juvenile wordplay and some disarming Dadaesque business. Criterion's restored DVD images please in vivid shades of Easter. The single disc includes a 1966 interview with Karina and a 1957 short by Godard, written by fellow new-waver Eric Rohmer.

If essentially a formal lark, "Woman" remains quintessential Godard. "I don't know if this is a comedy or tragedy," says Brialy to the camera, "but it's a masterpiece." He's about right.

'The Lower Depths'

($39.95, Criterion Collection)
Jean Renoir 1936 version:
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Akira Kurosawa 1957 version:
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As done previously with "The Killers" and Yasujiro Ozu's "Floating Weeds," the Criterion Collection presents two interpretations of the same material in one package. The source is Maxim Gorky's play, about the residents and proprietors of a flophouse, in which not much happens -- a few people die and a love triangle comes to a head, but the play's main interest is the beliefs people build up to save themselves from despair.

Made in pre-World War II France, Jean Renoir's version adds some optimism and considerable charm to the tale. The relationship between Renoir's two leading men, thief Jean Gabin and bankrupt baron Louis Jouvet, is established with enough wry grace to carry the film. Jouvet catches Gabin robbing his house, but as all he owns is about to be repossessed, he befriends the burglar instead of complaining. The action returns to the flophouse for the next hour but always keeps Gabin's desire to reinvent himself in the foreground.

Kurosawa, truer to the play, abandons the baron-thief friendship and most of Renoir's light-heartedness. (The informative DVD commentary claims that Kurosawa viewed "Lower Depths" as a bleak comedy, but it's woefully short on humor.) He also keeps the film in the play's single location and uses his ever-moving actors to create some stunning compositions. But even the charismatic Toshiro Mifune (as the thief) can't break free of Gorky's gravity; viewers will likely find themselves more interested in counting the differences between the two films than in following Kurosawa's drama on its own terms.
-- John DeFore

'Bad(der) Santa'

($29.99, Miramax Home Entertainment)
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Those who loved last year's Billy Bob Thornton film "Bad Santa" will tell you that it was a perfect, misanthropic antidote to treacly holiday entertainment.

The problem is, such an antitode already existed: the very funny, very charming and smartly subversive (at least for its first hour) "Elf." "Bad Santa" ("Badder Santa" on this supposedly naughty DVD release), on the other hand, tries so hard to push the envelope of bad taste that it succeeds only in straining in unnecessary and ultimately timid directions and fails on several fronts. Is it a comedy? Not really. It's not funny enough. Is it a dark satire on commercialism? Nope. It expires just past the gonads and belly on its way up to the brain. Is it entertaining? Only intermittently, such as when the late John Ritter and Bernie Mac share a scene together, or when "little person" Tony Cox goes on a curse-laden rant.

It's clear that this concoction, sketched out by Joel and Ethan Coen and directed byerry Zwigoff ("Ghost World"), is trying to push past the sanctified veneer of the Christmas season, to put the X into Xmas.

That's not a bad idea, but the sloppy execution, despite a valiant effort by Billy Bob Thorton, feels flimsy and tossed together. "Santa" takes lazy shots with diminishing returns as it drunkenly shambles along with characters who don't make sense (Lauren Graham's bartender floozy with a heart of gold, for instance) and a hollow, unsympathetic lead character.

The DVD extras are negligible. No commentary for Zwigoff to explain himself and a scant bit of included outtakes and deleted scenes are about as unfunny as the film itself.
-- Omar L. Gallaga

New this week: "Secret Window," "Reno 911: The Complete First Season," "Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii," "Poirot Set 9," "The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra," "The Joe Schmo Show -- Season One Uncensored," "The Line King: The Al Hirschfeld Story."