DVD reviews: Entertaining oddballs

It's a first-time-on-DVD release for peculiar thriller The Fantasist, there are four pearls in The Max Ophuls Collection and a young Charlotte Rampling gets her claw out in The Night Porter...

The Fantasist
***

Nicolas Cage's current terrifyingly unscary remake of The Wicker Man is undoubtedly the justification for the first-time-on-DVD release of The Fantasist.

Why? Because this peculiar 1986 thriller's cautionary yarn of Patricia, a hearty Irish farm girl who arrives in a Dublin seething with sexual perversion, and a poetic serial killer on the loose is directed and written by Robin Hardy, the British director of the perplexingly distinctive original The Wicker Man back in 1973.

It's that same eccentric, unsettling tone that conjures occasional dark magic from what is a fairly hobbling TV plot, acted by pretty pedestrian actors.

There are some entertaining oddball characters, mainly Patricia's dates - including a balloon-obsessed teacher with a widow's peak who seduces girls by offering to 'rub your tummy' - so it's a curiosity worth investigating. Extras: Trailer.

Larushka Ivan-Zadeh

The Max Ophuls Collection
*****

Max Ophuls was part of the flood of talent from Germany to the US before and during World War II, and there were few as gifted as he was: a director of elegant, fluid, unforgettable stories of impossible romance and fateful plotting. Yet weirdly, he has fallen off the radar to such an extent that this quartet is the first British release of his work on DVD, with the exception of his whimsical historic drama Lola Montes.

These four are pearls: Joan Fontaine as an obsessed lover in the heartbreaking (but never mawkish) Letter From An Unknown Woman; Joan Bennett struggling to free herself from blackmailing James Mason in The Reckless Moment; the jewels that shift from one woman to another, their ill-fated influence growing with each transfer, in Madame de...; and the three charming de Maupassant short stories that make up Ophuls's exploration of love and happiness, Le Plaisir.

All these were made between 1948 and 1953 and boast a technical assurance and a penetrating loveliness, as Oph¸ls's camera glides from character to character, often round in a circle; it's amazing to note how many references to circularity the director (who, appropriately, was born and died in Germany) managed to bring into his work. There are astonishing 360-degree shots, clocks, merry-go-rounds and many, many characters who - like Ophuls himself - travel far only to end up back where they came from.

But artistry never takes priority over narrative: Ophuls was a great teller of daring stories where love, fate and mendacity go to war and love only rarely wins. Anyone who dips into these films (the best place to start is Madame de...) will leave hungry for more. Further gems include the masterpiece La Ronde (from the story by Arthur Schnitzler, whose work was most recently turned by Stanley Kubrick into the much lesssuccessful Eyes Wide Shut). It only needs someone to release them.

Extras: Two have intros by director Todd Haynes; Le Plaisir includes a doc and a photographic short story.

Nina Caplan

The Night Porter
***

Young Charlotte Rampling resembles a panther in Liliana Cavani's weird, occasionally preposterous, film The Night Porter: she's dark, slinky and vulnerable or fierce in turn. Rampling plays Lucia, a Holocaust survivor now married to a wealthy man.