Sabzian Selects (Again): Week 12

Sabzian Selects (Again): Week 12

Leading up to Valentine’s Day, the films in this week’s selection each look at love in a very distinct way. If a love triangle makes for a joyful pre-Code comedy in Design for Living, it is the stuff of nightmares in Ôshima’s Empire of Passion. Finally, in How to Remain Single, John Wilson explores the meaning of love in times of dating apps, beauty pageants and an ever-growing sex industry. Even though the answers may be very distinct, all three films pose a common question: how to love?

Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)
On a train to Paris, commercial artist Gilda meets two promising artists: a painter and a playwright. What follows is a sexy celebration of free love: the trio comes to a “gentleman’s agreement”, a non-monogamous relationship that allows Gilda to keep seeing both men platonically, all the while helping them thrive in their artistic professions. As much as the witty dialogue in Design for Living speaks in wordplay and suggestive blank spaces, much of what is told in the film itself exists off-screen. Eventually, the “no sex” part of the gentleman’s agreement is broken, but the action is only implied in gazes: it belongs to the world in between scenes. You can rent Design for Living via Amazon Prime.

Ai no bôrei [Empire of Passion] (Nagisa Ôshima, 1978)
In Empire of Passion, a love triangle takes a less cheerful turn. In a Japanese village at the end of the nineteenth century, a married woman and mother, Seki, starts an affair with a neighbour in the village. As her new lover is consumed by jealousy, they decide to kill her husband and dump his body in a well. All seems to go by plan, until the husband’s ghost returns to haunt them. “Just as in [the film] In the Realm of the Senses,” Ôshima told Positif in 1978, “the story is about a man and a woman who do not hesitate in aligning their daily existence with their deepest sexual urges. Nowadays, nothing interests me quite as much as approaching the various forms that love can take with people who can only be saved by that love.” Empire of Passion is screened at MUBI.

How to Remain Single (John Wilson, 2015)
John Wilson’s How to Remain Single might as well be a late capitalist era synthesis of the two previous films. Narrated as a reluctant tutorial on modern day love in New York City, “one of the most efficient places to date on the planet,” he offers a “simple guide on how to end relationships before they begin”. You can watch How to Remain Single for free over at Vimeo.

Online Selection
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08 Feb 2021 - 14 Feb 2021