Criterion Dungeon | Your guide to Boutique Labels

At Mondo Vision, we are passionate in preserving and releasing radical, innovative, and truly extraordinary works of contemporary world cinema. The only criterion is that each film should offer a new challenge to serious cinephiles seeking to discover pure creativity and entertainment. Our ultimate goal is to expose some of cinema’s rarely-seen gems.

MVSE001 (Special Edition)
Andrzej Zulawski’s La Femme Publique is a cinematic milestone rich with extreme imagery and raw emotions. Twenty-five years after its controversial inception at the Cannes Film Festival, this story of a young, struggling actress retains the power to shock even the most seasoned of movie goers with its violently stylish, apocalyptic tone. A woman’s destiny, divided between angel and demon… An hour and fifty-four minutes of painful happiness, La Femme Publique scratches the soul, slaps the eyes, and seduces like the maelstrom that each one of us hides beyond the conscious. To summarize La Femme Publique is impossible, dangerous and impoverishing. Zulawski is not a man of words; he plays and juggles with the image, the color, the rhythm, the sound, the music, and this unspeakable shamelessness that he steals from his actors so effectively. Between humor and paroxysm, La Femme Publique is a fascinating metaphysical experience with a degree of intensity that needs to be seen to be believed. Simply put, it represents cinema at its most insane and brilliant.

Street date: 11/11/2008
UPC: 837654024652
Catalog: MVSE001

MVLE001 (Limited Edition)
Andrzej Zulawski’s La Femme Publique is a cinematic milestone rich with extreme imagery and raw emotions. Twenty-five years after its controversial inception at the Cannes Film Festival, this story of a young, struggling actress retains the power to shock even the most seasoned of movie goers with its violently stylish, apocalyptic tone. A woman’s destiny, divided between angel and demon… An hour and fifty-four minutes of painful happiness, La Femme Publique scratches the soul, slaps the eyes, and seduces like the maelstrom that each one of us hides beyond the conscious. To summarize La Femme Publique is impossible, dangerous and impoverishing. Zulawski is not a man of words; he plays and juggles with the image, the color, the rhythm, the sound, the music, and this unspeakable shamelessness that he steals from his actors so effectively. Between humor and paroxysm, La Femme Publique is a fascinating metaphysical experience with a degree of intensity that needs to be seen to be believed. Simply put, it represents cinema at its most insane and brilliant.

Street date: 11/11/2008
UPC: 837654024645
Catalog: MVLE001

MVSE002 (Special Edition)
Andrzej Zulawski’s L’important C’est D’aimer is a film of dishevelled lyricism, bursting with noise and anger; an insane storm-tainted flamboyant opera; a visual symphony with apocalyptic emphasis featuring sleaze-bags, clowns, drop-outs, wimps, bastards, and “puppet shows depicting lives of complete scoundrels” and “ruined careers.” Where some people will see nothing but a graphic canvas of pain, horror and a bloody parade of violence, others who analyze the darkness will see a call for compassion. This is the story of a fragile woman, Nadine Chevalier, who supports her failure-obsessed companion to the bitter end, and who meets a photographer weighed down by remorse. This vibrant and captivating cinema of art, music and sound is down to the genius of Zulawski, and his sensual and sentimental power of evocation, which together create something which reflects the deep and perhaps unconfessed anxiety inside every one of us. It is, as Dostoyevsky said at the end of ‘Crime and Punishment,’ “the story of a generation.”

Street date: 6/16/2009
UPC: 837654037904
Catalog: MVSE002

MVLE002 (Limited Edition)
Andrzej Zulawski’s L’important C’est D’aimer is a film of dishevelled lyricism, bursting with noise and anger; an insane storm-tainted flamboyant opera; a visual symphony with apocalyptic emphasis featuring sleaze-bags, clowns, drop-outs, wimps, bastards, and “puppet shows depicting lives of complete scoundrels” and “ruined careers.” Where some people will see nothing but a graphic canvas of pain, horror and a bloody parade of violence, others who analyze the darkness will see a call for compassion. This is the story of a fragile woman, Nadine Chevalier, who supports her failure-obsessed companion to the bitter end, and who meets a photographer weighed down by remorse. This vibrant and captivating cinema of art, music and sound is down to the genius of Zulawski, and his sensual and sentimental power of evocation, which together create something which reflects the deep and perhaps unconfessed anxiety inside every one of us. It is, as Dostoyevsky said at the end of ‘Crime and Punishment,’ “the story of a generation.”

Street date: 6/16/2009
UPC: 837654037911
Catalog: MVLE002

MVSE003 (Special Edition)
Andrzej Zulawski’s L’Amour Braque is the story of a hideously bloody vendetta, of bonds of friendship between two men from opposite backgrounds and of love within an eternal triangle. Intended as homage to Dostoyevsky and loosely based on his novel ‘The Idiot ’, L’Amour Braque is a mad love-triangle: Léo (The Prince Of Idiots), Mary (The Virgin Whore), and Mickey (The Immoral Gangster). Zulawski’s postmodern existentialist adaptation is presented with an intense sense of visual style suggestive of the hyper-realistic and chaotic world of Bande-Dessinée. Abundant with images that persist and last in memory, from start to finish the screen is filled with outbursts of energy and eruptions of emotional violence where “notions of ‘performance as madness’ are choreographed into a perverse, bloody ballet”. L’Amour Braque displays craftwork of originality and imagination in which “moments of brilliance happen under the watchful eye of a knowing master.”

Street date: 10/15/2009
UPC: 837654037928
Catalog: MVSE003

MVLE003 (Limited Edition)
Andrzej Zulawski’s L’Amour Braque is the story of a hideously bloody vendetta, of bonds of friendship between two men from opposite backgrounds and of love within an eternal triangle. Intended as homage to Dostoyevsky and loosely based on his novel ‘The Idiot ’, L’Amour Braque is a mad love-triangle: Léo (The Prince Of Idiots), Mary (The Virgin Whore), and Mickey (The Immoral Gangster). Zulawski’s postmodern existentialist adaptation is presented with an intense sense of visual style suggestive of the hyper-realistic and chaotic world of Bande-Dessinée. Abundant with images that persist and last in memory, from start to finish the screen is filled with outbursts of energy and eruptions of emotional violence where “notions of ‘performance as madness’ are choreographed into a perverse, bloody ballet”. L’Amour Braque displays craftwork of originality and imagination in which “moments of brilliance happen under the watchful eye of a knowing master.”

Street date: 10/15/2009
UPC: 837654037935
Catalog: MVLE003