The Virgin Spring
Criterion, 1961
$34.99

Backstory
C’mon, everybody knows this movie is based on the 13th-century Swedish ballad, ‘Töre’s Daughter at Vänge’. No? You didn’t? Well, this particular song (with lines like: “For thy kinsmen care not we/ We’ll kill them all as well as thee.”) was a childhood favorite of director Ingmar Bergman, who commissioned writer Ulla Isaksson to novelize the ballad and then help adapt it into a screenplay.

Feature
Set during the beginning stages of Swedish Christianity, the story follows the bright, sunny, eponymous virgin Karin, daughter of the wealthy Töre, as she heads off through the foreboding woods to church. Karin is initially joined by her foster sister Ingeri (the dark, moody avatar of the old paganism, in contrast to Karin’s smug Christian purity), but carries on into the wood alone after Ingeri is upset by a premonition. As we should all know, bad things happen when sunshiny Medieval maidens head into the woods unaccompanied, and so it goes with Karin, who is soon raped and murdered by some wandering goat herders. Having clearly never seen an episode of Law and Order, the herders proceed to Töre’s compound and — wait for it — attempt to sell Karin’s pilfered clothes back to her mother. Bad move. Töre figures it out, locks the herdsmen in the banquet hall, grabs the butcher’s knife and takes his violent revenge. While The Virgin Spring has often been characterized as a Medieval morality play on the big screen, it actually goes far deeper than Old Testament moral calculus. Foreshadowing his so-called Chamber Films of the 1960s and 70s, Bergman sketches in some very 20th-century character details, expanding one-dimensional archetypes into three-dimensional human beings.

Extras
Where to begin… How about Ang Lee’s impassioned love letter to Bergman, in which he describes the tremendous impact of seeing The Virgin Spring as a young film student in Taiwan? Then there’s the full, 1975 lecture (audio only) given by Bergman at the AFI, which reveals an artist at the height of his passion and in command of a deep cinematic intelligence. But pay close attention to something Bergman says during the lecture (I paraphrase), “I’m amazed when people ask about the deeper meaning of my movies, or try to assign to them a deeper meaning. I’m just trying to tell a story.” You know who didn’t pay any attention to that? Bergman scholar Birgitta Steene, whose commentary is reminiscent of the kind of prattling, film school orotundity that drives people into engineering. N.B. If you haven’t seen this film already, avoid the special features until after you’ve watched the movie. Just trust me.

Verdict
Apparently those Nouvelle Vague punks jumped all over The Virgin Spring, claiming it revealed Bergman as a bourgeois fraud. Sadly though, he took their reactionary carping to heart and subsequently disavowed the film. They’re all wrong. It’s a great movie.


The World
Zeitgeist
$29.99
2004

Backstory
We’re almost caught up: this handsome edition of Jia Zhangke’s most recent effort makes it three of four films by China’s best new director in a couple decades available on Region One discs.

Feature
While Jia’s first three features tracked Chinese youth trapped in provincial dead-ends, his first state-sanctioned movie transports them to Beijing’s World Park, an Epcot-esque theme park whose landmark replicas (the Great Pyramids, Leaning Tower of Pisa, etc.) represent the simultaneous promise and tease of the new globalism: “See the world without ever leaving Beijing.” It’s probably because of the oeuvre-defining metaphor of World Park that Jia, never particularly subtle with his thematic concerns, bogs his 139-minute opus down in redundant subplots and diminishing-return cutaways to the (tantalizingly fake) Eiffel Tower. Fortunately, The World also represents significant stylistic advances: the increasing flamboyance of his characteristic long takes is underlined with a propulsive techno score, and animated text-message sequences illustrate the potential for new modes of connection.

Extras
U.S. and Canadian trailers (the latter interspersed with commentary from Chicago Reader critic and vocal World advocate Jonathan Rosenbaum), and production photos; the booklet features director’s notes and a character cheat sheet.

Verdict
Still waiting on a U.S. DVD release of Xiao Wu, Jia’s first (and best) film — who’s stepping up?


The Brown Bunny
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
2003
$19.99

Backstory
Like a welfare bum who wins the lottery, Vincent Gallo squandered his small fortune of street cred earned on Buffalo ’66 with this most notorious of vanity projects. It was booed at Cannes and prompted Gallo to apologize. Then when he heard that Roger Ebert called it “the worst film in the history of the festival”, he erupted Mount Gallo style and wished cancer on Ebert. A few months later, amazingly, Ebert actually was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. A recovery and a reconciliation later, a shortened version appears festooned with “Adults Only” warning stickers, thanks to the infamously explicit finale featuring indie shit-disturber and former Gallo gal-pal Chloë Sevigny.

Feature
Gallo, who produced, wrote, edited and directed is in every scene and nearly every frame of what comes across like a filmed treatment. After losing a motorcycle race, Gallo’s wounded American hero makes a heathen’s pilgrimage across the country in his van, affording us extended views of the paved American landscape. It captures the tedious malaise of a road trip all too accurately. His encounters with a series of women along the way (including a frightening-looking one-time 70s supermodel Cheryl Tiegs) are brief, oblique and utterly lacking emotional depth. The climax, so to speak — a reunion with the proverbial “true love of his life” is as shocking for the suddenness of nakedly cohesive narrative elements as for what is probably now the world’s most famous blowjob.

Verdict
Like a student film made in Adult Ed.

State of Mind
Kino
2004
$29.95

Backstory
Having made the 2002 documentary The Game of Their Lives about the 1966 North Korean World Cup soccer team, the Brit filmmakers then gained unparalleled access to the most secretive state on the planet, to document the phenomenon known as the Mass Games.

Feature
For Westerners fed a steady diet of unwaveringly one dimensional glimpses of North Korea as evil rogue state, what shocks is the humanity of the people depicted — and their relative affluence. The filmmakers are inexplicably given complete unrestrained access to two of the schoolgirls who perform as gymnasts at the mind-boggling spectacle in honour of “the father” Kim Jong-Il. Almost all their free time is spent preparing for the nearly month-long event. The performance footage dazzles and calls to mind the world’s most elaborate Olympic opening ceremonies ever as conceived by Albert Speer. In gaining the trust of the two girls and their charming families — admittedly hand-picked by the authorities — what comes through is a fiercely proud nation united by a self-fulfilling “us against the world” mentality. The chillingly Orwellian programming of man, woman and child is expected, their persuasively articulate arguments against the Imperialist Americans, less so.

Extras
Insightful interview with director Gordon, and 9-minute CNN feature that manages to apply the reductionist steamroller technique of American network news to a nuanced portrayal.

Verdict
Does what a good doc ought to. Challenges preconceived notions without resorting to mawkish sentiment.