Darling and Design for Living

Today was a double feature about infidelity and polyamory!

Darling (1965), directed by John Schlesinger and starring Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. Christie won the BAFTA and the Oscar for her performance, playing a model who moves from one affair to another as she pursues her career.  

In the end, she returns to an unhappy marriage to an wealthy Italian prince when she is rejected by a former lover  (Dirk Bogarde). Her lively exuberance and beauty give her great charisma, but she also suffers the consequences of selfish choices. The movie has a kind of edgy humor.

Design for Living (1933),  directed by Ernst Lubitsch, and starring Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper and Fredric March. The Noel Coward play was basically re-written by Ben Hecht, removing the more overtly gay subtext. Gilda is pursued by two starving artists and a wealthy businessman. She declines to choose between the two attractive artists and they agree to a platonic threesome. This doesn't last long, and she becomes the lover of first one, and then the other. Jealousy and accusations of betrayal ensue, and she leaves both of them to marry the stodgy boring businessman. She's miserable in the marriage, and when the two artists show up at her mansion she ends up leaving with both of them, presumably to enter into a threesome with them both. In contrast to Darling, where the woman's free sexuality is connected to infidelity and degrading orgies, in Design for Living, the  idea of witty polyamory is presented as preferable to a loveless bourgeois marriage.

Ash is Purest White

Jia Zhangke's film Ash is Purest White (2019) is  apparently a kind of summation of all his previous films. I found his first three films on Criterion, so I'll have to watch them. I'd seen it at the PFA, so seeing it again on the small screen I was so glad I'd seen it in a theater. My first viewing of it was very emotional: the first act is a gangster story with the most arresting and engaging performance by Tao Zhao; the second act shows what happens to her after she gets out of prison where she has spent five years taking the fall for her boyfriend Bin; the last act returns to their home turf and now he is recovering from a stroke and depends on her for survival. Over seventeen years their lives are played out on the backdrop of the enormous changes to China. Her father rails against the abandonment of the mine and the miners. She rids a boat through the Three Gorges where they are told that what they see will soon be under water because of a dam projects. The raggedy workers' housing blocs set in the middle of the fields give way to block after block of high-rises, an enormous train station, a huge arena. As was the case in Bi Gan's film that we just watched, we have the impression that people are like small creatures finding shelter and surviving in a massive coral reef, but here we don't have the close-ups on the corroding walls but a sweep from back-rooms to street plazas, to trains hurtling through the landscape, to a starry sky lit up by mysterious flash that could be a UFO or that could be the forces of change. 

Tao Zhao, the lead actress, is also Jia Zhangke's wife, and has appeared in nine of his films. She was working as a dance teacher when he cast her in the film Platform, and you can see her dancer's  expressivity in her acting. I'm eager to watch the his first three films, available on Criterion, and the two that are on Mubi.