A Matter of Life and Death

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH   ****

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

1946

IDEA:  Having miraculously survived after jumping from his burning plane during World War II, a British pilot conducts a romance with the radio operator he had communicated with before the incident while he simultaneously prepares to stand before a celestial court and defend his right to live.

BLURB:  Some films operate at such an audacious and formidable level - conceptually, thematically, aesthetically - that you can’t help but give yourself over to their astonishments. Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death is one such film. A quixotic, genre-mashing fantasia from an industry and an era not especially known for their formal daring, the film executes its loopy premise with a full-throated bravado and visual elegance that are, to risk cliché, heavenly. But A Matter of Life and Death is so confident in its approach and so ravishing in its design that it resists cliché, even as it openly courts it in Borzagian appeals to the transcendent power of love. Like that filmmaker-romantic, Powell and Pressburger exult in the possibilities of cinema to capture and expand the imagination. Their opulent, thoughtful use of Technicolor, courtesy of DP Jack Cardiff, remains nearly unmatched in sheer beauty, and their astute sense of how and when to employ practical effects - animation, motorized sets, puppetry - yields movie magic more potent than CGI. Such formal ingenuity serves a film that’s both a top-shelf work of fantasy and a distinctly postwar time capsule, and in ways that are inextricable. Portraying, wittily, a cosmic legal battle for one man’s right to life and love in the wake of World War II, A Matter of Life and Death fancifully recovers a human(ism) lost during the war and uses it to disarm the deadly follies of nationalism. Powell and Pressburger land their shots at both the British and Americans in keenly sarcastic ways; they know, having just won the war together, that the two are as close as Peter and June. Could the actual human romance at the center of the film be more convincing, and could June have been something more than a stock female love interest? Sure, but some films are so grand that their spells overwhelm, offering visions of life (and death?) that make other concerns finally feel so puny.