Favorites
Of The Moon (1984/Cohen
Media Group Blu-ray)/The
French Minister
(2013/MPI/Sundance Selects DVD)/L'eclisse
(1962 aka The
Eclipse/Criterion Blu-ray
w/DVD)
Picture:
B/C+/B & C+ Sound: C+/C+/B- & C+ Extras: C/C/B
Films: C+/C+/B
Here
are a set of select foreign films you should know about, including a
classic...
Otar
Iosseliani's Favorites
Of The Moon
(1984) is being issued by the Cohen Media Group on its 30th
Anniversary, a tale of France old and new. The film begins by going
back and forth between the country in the last full centuries (in
black and white, usually with unhearable dialogue and people living
harmoniously with nature & art) and the late 20th
Century (with its greed, gridded living, technology, ignorance and
eroding fast pace of living) following art and hand-crafted works
when they were made and first acquired, then seeing what is happening
to hem and who has them today. This could have been a profound, even
intellectual drama, but Ioseliani has other ideas.
He
quickly introduces absurd visuals, situations and other awkward
arrangements in the mode of Luis Bunuel to some good effect, but the
film manages not to become a spoof of itself or an imitator of anyone
else. We get a side plot about some French men offering deadly
weapons to a group of Islamists who intend to commit a few acts of
terror, but it is hard to see what they are going to do or if all the
men involved are Islamists or even Arabs. It is the film playing
this loose that both helps it and limits it. I have not seen it in
eons and only so much stuck with me, but it has enough interesting,
amusing moments at 105 minutes to give it a look. At least it is a
smart, mature film about something.
Extras
include another nicely illustrated booklet from Cohen on the film
including informative text and an essay by Giovanni Vimercati,
feature length audio commentary track by Phillip Lopate and a 2014
rerelease Theatrical Trailer.
Bertrand
Tavernier's The
French Minister
(2013) wants to be a smart satire about linguistics, politics and the
way people (mis-)communicate as a young upstart writer (Raphael
Personnaz) is hired to write for the eccentric title character
(Thierry Lhermitte) who sees himself as battling an overbearing
United States (George W. Bush is President here despite being issued
5 years after the end of his last term) as he wants a speech that
gets to the point and takes on geopolitics in an almost antagonistic
way. This is as much talk as anything else and has some good
moments, based on a graphic novel comic book, but it does not
necessarily always translate well into live action as they might
think.
Tavernier
has had an at least ambitious career with films like Coup
de torchon
(1980), 'Round
Midnight
(1986), Safe
Conduct
(2002) and In
The Electric Mist
(2009), with this being one of his more interesting efforts. It is
at least consistent and is able to juggle the politics, but this is
at the cost of some repetitiveness despite a solid cast that also
includes Niels Arestrup, Bruno Raffaelli, Julie Gayet and Thomas
Chabrol. If politics are your thing, you'll especially want to see
this one, but otherwise, you had better have a good attention span or
you might get lost.
Extras
include a Making Of featurette and Original Theatrical Trailer.
Last
but definitely not least is Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse
(1962), the end of a trilogy of black and white neo-realist films
that ended the classical era of such films in Italian cinema, dealt
with Italian isolationism and moves into a realm of pure cinema like
few filmmakers had ventured before. Monica Vitti is back, this time
playing a woman whose time with her lover (Francisco Rabal) has
ended, of which this film profoundly explores why in its early long
scene with them. That in itself is a remarkable start to the film,
but then she moves on to her friends who seem nice for the most part
and in the process, meets another man (Alain Delon) who she becomes
interested in. He is involved in money markets, but that becomes a
metaphor for industry moving by and taking people and their free time
to know themselves with them.
The
reason this is more effective than a smart film like Moon
above is that it takes the long way to explore these issues and
though this film has its own humor, its greatest visuals and knowing
way about them makes it stark, memorable and a very original work.
Not that everything works and there are a few moments that make this
uneven at times, it is an amazing film, for the most time and has
some great moments I was very happy to see again after all these
years. Rome is also a character, but not always a positive one.
Vitti and Antonioni would soon reunite in the first of a trilogy of
color films that follow the same themes with new things to say in Red
Desert
(1964), reviewed in two versions (so far?) on this site including
Criterion's fine Blu-ray. L'eclisse
holds up as an amazing film that everyone should consider a must-see!
Extras
include Criterion's usually thick, illustrated booklet on the film
including informative text, essays by Jonathan Rosenbaum &
Gilberto Perez and excerpts from Antonioni's own work, while both
format versions include a feature length audio commentary track by
film scholar Richard Peña, former program director of New York's
Film Society of Lincoln Center, plus two featurettes: Michelangelo
Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema
(2001, 56 minutes) exploring the director's life and career and
Elements
of Landscape,
a twenty-two-minute piece from 2005 about Antonioni and L'eclisse,
featuring Italian film critic Adriano Aprà and longtime Antonioni
friend Carlo di Carlo.
The
Blu-ray transfers here are really nice, though they have some minor
flaws at times, but offer new HD masters as transfer with 1080p 1.85
X 1 digital High Definition image transfer presentations. Moon
(a 2K master) was shot on Kodak color and some black and white
stocks, but despite some grain and parts of the print that show its
age, this is very impressive throughout. L'eclisse
comes from two 35mm composite fine grain black and white masters
positives and has even more great shots, but the generation lost from
the original negative can show at times, but the best shots really
shine.
It is narrowly better than Moon
and shows us how greatly this film was shot by Director of
Photography Gianni di Vernanzo, which still looks decent in its
anamorphically
enhanced DVD version, but it is no match for the Blu-ray.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on Minister
can be soft at times, shot on an Arri Alexa HD camera. It looks
good, but not always great, though some of that might be the format,
As
for sound, Minister
is easily the newest recording and here in a lossy French Dolby
Digital 5.1 mix, but the soundfield is not as good as I had hoped for
despite the dialogue being the main focus of the sound. As a result,
the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on the L'eclisse
DVD and lossless PCM 2.0 Mono on Moon than more can compete, but the
lossless PCM 2.0 Mono on the L'eclisse
Blu-ray sounds the best of them all, derived from several optical
soundtrack sources at 24 bits.
-
Nicholas Sheffo
