Out on DVD this week: three new releases from three master directors. Ang Lee's mysteriously overlooked spy thriller Lust, Caution, Jean Luc-Goddard's new wave classic Pierrot Le Fou and Brian de Palma's controversial Iraq drama Redacted.
1. Lust, Caution
Focus Features
Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is a gorgeous film, sweeping you away to a different time and place. Based on a classic short story by Eileen Wang, the heart and soul of this NC-17 espionage thriller belongs to a young woman who comes of age in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II. Tang Wei is disarmingly beautiful, and she gives a wonderful debut performance opposite Chinese star Tony Leung, who plays the sadistic lover she has been lured to kill.
2. Pierrot Le Fou
Criterion Collection
Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeoisie behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard's tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of consumerist satire, politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, "the last romantic couple." With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot Le Fou is one of the high points of the French new wave, and was Godard's last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema.
3. Redacted
Magnolia
Told entirely through "found" footage, Brian De Palma's incendiary polemic reconstructs the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl by American soldiers in Samarra in 2006. Redacted feels like a well-aimed punch to the gut -- or perhaps a stab in the heart. Whether blunt or sharp, the film's impact is impossible to dismiss.
