A breezy film, especially considering the seriousness of its title, this Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger production follows a British World War II pilot (David Niven) who miraculously survives a plane crash. Having cheated death, he is visited by representatives of the afterlife, who convene to hold a trial over his fate. His main evidence in support of continuing to live? The fact that he’s fallen in love with the American servicewoman (Kim Hunter) with whom he shared an impassioned SOS radio call as his plane went down. As charming as Niven and Hunter are—especially in that early radio exchange—this works for me more as a philosophical thought experiment and formal exercise than a moving, emotional experience (for the latter, I’ll take Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes). For A Matter of Life and Death, the filmmakers erect elaborate sets, employ intricate miniatures, and display imaginative matte paintings, creating a clever cosmos unlike any other onscreen, something that’s outside of both fantasy and science fiction. (A giant, moving staircase that connects heaven and Earth is a masterpiece of its own kind.) And the decision to shoot the celestial realm in black and white and the terrestrial scenes in Technicolor is delightfully counterintuitive. After all, A Matter of Life and Death is less enthralled with the unknowable afterworld than it is with the vibrant brightness we experience in the here and now.
