Lost in Criterion Lost in Criterion

We here at Lost in Criterion love Luis Buñuel, and (currently) this is the last one we have in the Criterion Collection. Belle de Jour (1967) is the story of a middle class woman, wife of a surgeon, who becomes a sex worker in the afternoons. Or it's about a middle class woman who imagines that she's become a sex worker in the afternoons. Buñuel takes a lot of liberties with the source material and imagines a film that is perhaps 100% a character's fantasies, but even if it's not, it's still at least 50% a character's fantasies. And yet, somehow, it's also one of the director's most subdued films.

Noel Coward's Design for Living premiered in Cleveland, Ohio -- apparently the world's bastion of progressive and transgressive theater at the time -- on January 2, 1933. By the end of the month it would be on Broadway, by the end of the year Ernst Lubitsch and Ben Hecht would adapt it into the sexiest film of 1933. Meanwhile, Coward wouldn't stage the play in his native England for nearly another decade. Why? Well, one there's the scandal of even portraying a polyamorous relationship, but then Coward's play, like Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962), portrays polyamory only to show it not working. That's one of the major changes in Lubitsch's version, and the film is all the more scandalous for it: here the relationship is rocky but in the end works out, maybe. No wonder the Production Code Administration hated it.

Somehow Sidney Lumet is our most watched director on our Patreon bonus episodes, but the actual Criterion Collection has a distinct lack. We get one of his best this week with 12 Angry Men (1957), a film adaptation of a teleplay from the Golden Age of Television (though not from Spine 495: The Golden Age of Television boxset). Our friend Stephen G. joins us to talk about how this is a great movie whose politics are not as great as we'd like and whose understanding of the legal system is going to lead to a mistrial.

The final film in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy, and the final film of the director's life, is the capstone to the set and, perhaps, a capstone to his entire career. A story of connection, coupled with the others in the trilogy, we're reminded that without Fraternity - the guiding theme of this film - life is hell. You gotta care. You deserve to be cared about.

D.H. Lawrence once said "Never trust the teller, trust the tale" and we fully embrace that as we struggle to step around the obvious political metaphor of a rocky relationship between a French woman and a Polish man in Krzysztof Kieślowski's anti-romantic comedy "Equality" movie Three Colors: White. Kieślowski is rather insistent that these are not political movies, though his collaborator and co-screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz is perhaps less insistent. In either case though, the tale does the talking.

This week we kick off Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy with Blue. Each of the three colors, drawn from the colors of the French flag, are also used in the films to represent one of the ideals of the French Revolution: Blue is associated with Liberty, White with Equality, and Red with Fraternity. Ultimately, as we'll discuss in the coming weeks, the films make an argument that without Fraternity, Liberty and Equality are meaningless and even hellish. In Blue we see a woman who has embraced solitude in response to grief.  She believes solitude is liberation from pain, but the film shows that to heal she needs human connection. It's a beautiful and brilliant film, and a masterpiece of synthesizing message and form.