Dead Leaves [DVD]

This is an Art Film. It is not a horror movie or an exploitation flick. Don't buy this expecting thrills or gore. Its subject matter is morbid. It tells of the obsessive love of a young man for a woman. The woman dies during an accidental fall at home. The man then takes her corpse on an interstate journey, ending in the woods by the sea where they had earlier pledged their love. There he curls up next to her and kills himself. The director, Constantin Werner, consciously sets out to create an Art Film. It is laced with poetry readings in place of dialogue. There is extensive use of Edgar Allan Poe's late ballad "Annabel Lee", as well as readings from other poets, including English translations of Artaud and Baudelaire. The poems center on love and death. The accompanying music ranges from classical to discordant rock and can be used to trace the young man's mental implosion. Werner uses the Chorale from Bach's St. Matthew Passion (Simon & Garfunkel's An American Tune) during the travel sequence to very good effect. The Liebestod (Love-Death) from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is of course totally in keeping with the movie's theme. Werner has deliberately created a distance between the characters and the audience so that you feel little empathy for them. The movie is unremittingly bleak and leaves you feeling depressed.The theme of obsessive love that endures after death has been explored before on film. The one that came to mind when watching this movie was Dominique Deruddere's 1987 Belgian film, "Crazy Love". While both movies end similarly in suicidal deaths, "Crazy Love" ends on a transcendent note with the idea that love lives on after death and leaves you feeling uplifted despite its morbid character. Here we are confronted with just death, death as the end of suffering. I found it too depressing. Some may take solace in the visual aesthetics which are quite arresting though it'd be pretty difficult in this present DVD transfer. Dead Leaves will almost certainly not appeal to most American audiences.The transfer as a whole is a mess. Cult Epics has provided a strange looking transfer with most of the film letterboxed in 1.85:1 (Non-Anamorphic) while certain insert shots as well as the end credits are in fullscreen. The picture quality is mediocre. This movie was shot on cheap 16mm film so you'd expect it to be grainy. It is doubly so. The image is soft to the point of blurriness. There are dirt specks and film defects scattered throughout the film. Circular imprints are also found throughout. Black levels are abysmal. You never get to see true black. Everything plateaus to a dull dark grey. The resultant picture looks flat with little depth. Shadow detail is non-existent. Audio is a basic 2.0 mono. There is an interesting director's commentary as well as a 20 minute "Making Of" featurette.

The plot written on the back of the DVD-box as well as on Amazon is correct but the description misses a single small detail - this is not a mainstream movie. So if you expect some interesting events, adventures and horrors related to travelling with a corpse you won't get them. "Dead Leaves" is a film of mood and feeling. There are practically no dialogs and no developments. But there are a lot of interesting metaphors, monotonous and hypnotizing music, long frames where you see actually nothing but mood - rainy highways, gloomy urban landscapes and deserted motels. I wouldn't say this movie is about madness. It's about mad love, true love. When Joey takes his deceased girlfriend for a road-trip it seems first he's so devastated he just doesn't know what he's doing. But then we see he takes her to a place he recalls they were happy at. This is not a trip to nowhere - it's a fateful journey to the beginning. To the beginning of their relation and to the beginning of life itself. Here we start to realize this trip can have only one kind of an ending. Joey is so in love with his fiancee he just can't let her go, he decides better to initiate this self-destructing tour and stay with his love till the very end. As I said this is a film of feeling and you can feel very clearly what Joey must feel. "Dead Leaves" is extremely sad and dismal, it's spellbinding and enchanting. And definately not for everyone. This is art-house at its best, very well crafted and elaborate. It's very nice to know such movies are still being made by someone.