Mirage de la vie

"Mirage de la vie" * is now a bonus in the "a time to love and a time to die" ,my all time favorite Sirk, DVD ;Made about three years before his death ,with wife participating , at a time when the director was eventually given his true place in the cinema;:while he was still working ,Sirk was generally despisingly considered "soap opera".

A very educated man ,a true intellectual , his oeuvre refutes all the former terse opinions ; he insists that none of his movies had the par excellence happy end of sentimental movies : in "exquisite ironies and magnificent obsessions ,Tom Ryan 's absorbing book, the writer mentions "there's always tomorrow " (the ending is shown) " the tarnished angels " "imitation of life" " written on the wind "and shows the ironical ambiguous side of these denouements ;the ending of "imitation of life " is extremely harsh and in "Sirk on Sirk " ,the director insists that no problem is solved; it has come full circle ; Sirk tells us he wanted Annie's luxurious funeral to contrast with an antique shop where we can see the finale from the window ;ending one's career on a funeral ,it's Sirk at his most ironical.

Hilda Jary ,Sirk's second wife ,tells us about their escape from Germany ( "verschwunden " is the word she uses , "overnight we disappeared ") on a night train and their first day in America where the director wanted to do horse-breeding but had to make do with chickens ;but the German career is not forgotten :"zu neuen Ufern " starring Zarah Leander shows Sirk's double entendre : is the heroine so happy to live South America for the "civilized" (then -Hitlerian) Germany,even though the story does not take place in those days?

The extracts are rare and the color quality is rather poor ; apart from Leander on the boat to her native Germany ,one has Dorothy Malone's frenzied dance ("written on the wind" ) , Jane Wyman's pivotal scene of the TV ,a so called window on the world which actually imprisons her in its screen (" all that heaven allows" ),Fred McMurray 's would be happiness (several extracts of "there's always tomorrow" ) .

For "a time to love and a time to die" (1958), one is granted a photograph of the shooting and that's it ; perhaps it was too hard for the director to broach this movie,which , more than any other in his filmography -even though he says " a scandal in Paris "is his favorite , it's not mine,by a long shot- , reflects a personal tragedy : his only son ,and his first wife's was forced to join the Hitlerian youth and was killed in action on the Russian front : there's a shot on a young soldier on the train back to front ,and Erich Maria Remarque's Ernst 's fate might be his boy's .

All that the precedent user wrote concerning the interview is true about the languages mishmash,and the frustrating side of this documentary which at 48 min, is too short to sum up such a huge work.

*French title of "imitation of life" .

This film is now available (curiously without opening credits) as a supplement in the fantastic Carlotta Films (France) Douglas Sirk box. It is essentially cuttings from a pair of interviews with Sirk -- and his wife Hilda Jary -- just three years before the great director's death. It is filled with wonderful Sirk-ly feeling, some fascinating insights into philosophy and revealing comments on Sirk's film-making processes. The interview is conducted in German, but, rather than systematically subtitled, it is at times voice-overed in French, more often subtitled (rather sketchily) in French -- or not translated at all! -- and for longish stretches. One makes the best one can of it, but it is rather a shame. I guess I'd better really learn German. Recommended, if you're buying the box anyway (and there are many reasons to do so). But at 70 euros, if this is the main reason you're going to buy it, think twice. On the other hand: how will you resist?