7.2 | / 10 |
Users | 3.5 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Ben du Toit is a schoolteacher who always has considered himself a man of caring and justice, at least on the individual level. When his gardener's son is brutally beaten up by the police at a demonstration by black school children, he gradually begins to realize his own society is built on a pillar of injustice and exploitation.
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Janet Suzman, Zakes Mokae, Jürgen Prochnow, Susan SarandonDrama | 100% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: LPCM 2.0
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Marlon Brando is regularly cited as being the single finest actor of his generation, and at least one example of that perceived overarching excellence was his presence (figuratively if not always literally, as fans of one Sacheen Littlefeather may recall) at the Academy Awards, which ranged from 1952, when he scored his first nomination as Best Actor for A Streetcar Named Desire, to 1990, when he was feted for the last time in his long and legendary career as Best Supporting Actor in A Dry White Season. It may seem like “ancient history” now to younger readers in particular, but this anti-apartheid film was deemed so ostensibly “controversial” in its day that it was actually banned in South Africa for at least a while (the always questionable Wikipedia weirdly states it was banned and then states it opened in South Africa in 1989, which was the year of the film’s original release, while the at least relatively more reliable IMDb lists 1992 as the first South African screening of the film, which seems more believable to me personally). Brando is actually kind of on the sidelines in this story, as an activist attorney named Ian McKenzie who is hired by the film’s focal character, a white teacher named Ben Du Toit (Donald Sutherland) who gets sucked in the morass of apartheid almost by accident, and perhaps at least partially against his will.
A Dry White Season is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of The Criterion Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. In lieu of an insert booklet, Criterion includes a kind of accordion style foldout which contains the following information on the transfer:
A Dry White Season is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1. Black bars at the top and bottom of the screen are normal for this format. This new digital transfer was created in 4K resolution on a Lasergraphics Director film scanner from the 35 mm original camera negative. Thousands of instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices, and warps were manually removed using MTI Film's DRS, while Digital Vision's Phoenix was used for jitter, flicker and small dirt.Detail levels and palette saturation are typically excellent throughout this presentation. Fine detail on elements like Ben's natty suit jackets or (more troublingly) the wounds suffered by some victims can be almost palpable at times. There's very little if any intentional grading in the film, and any changes in tonal qualities tend to result from lighting regimens. The outdoor material here pops best, as should probably be expected, with nicely vivid primaries. There are some curious variances in color temperature that show up from time to time (the first scene introducing Brando is a notable example). Grain is pretty gritty looking throughout this presentation and occasionally can add a kind of sickly yellow ambience to scenes (see screenshot 19, which is not an optical). My score is 4.25.
The original stereo soundtrack was remastered from the 35 mm magnetic track. Clicks, thumps, hiss, hum, and crackle were manually removed using Pro Tools HD and iZotope RX.
A Dry White Season features a nice sounding LPCM 2.0 track (see Criterion's verbiage on the provenance of the track above in the video section). The film does have a lot of fairly "talky" moments, where dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly, but there are also some more calamitous crowd scenes where the rabble of large groups is well rendered. Dave Grusin provides a rather uncharacteristically minimalist score, and there are some wonderful source cues courtesy of Ladysmith Black Mambazo which sound great (sadly the only soundtrack CD available omits the Ladysmith Black Mambazo songs, I assume for licensing reasons).
A Dry White Season may strike some as a historical curiosity, but it's really rather recent history, and as such may be both a salient warning about how badly blacks were treated in South Africa, but also perhaps a bit of a prophetic statement that things can indeed change. There's some unabashedly disturbing material here, but the film does a rather remarkable job of getting its points across without seeming like it's engaging in a screed. Technical merits are generally solid, and the supplements, while not bounteous, are also informative. Recommended.
1989
2005
2019
三度目の殺人
2017
2010
1976
1991
L'aveu
1970
État de siège
1972
Przesłuchanie / Slipcover in Original Pressing
1989
1965
1983
2007
Beat-up Little Seagull / Kyra
2017
1933
1984
Collector's Edition
1985
2015
1961
2016