Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

A Single Girl Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 28, 2015

Note: This film is available as part of The Benoit Jacquot Collection.

La Nouvelle Vague, the French New Wave, is a perhaps singular movement in the history of film, even if many of its supposed proponents would argue about whether there was an “official” movement at all. It’s hard to think of another example of a group of filmmakers crafting a series of films that revolutionized both content and (probably especially) form so viscerally as did iconoclasts like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard (and what’s really frightening is that these two titans, along with others in the New Wave whatever it was, were critics to begin with—yikes!) Maybe the Abstract Expressionists, or even the Americans who would later be identified (ironically by the French) as film noir adherents, could be afforded this same radical status, but the New Wave was so revolutionary and trendsetting that it seems to stand alone, a monolithic presence not just in its native country, but in the entire annals of cinema. That said, the fact that the New Wave looms so large in France’s history may have led to certain categorization issues for some French filmmakers who followed in the wake of the Wave, including Benoît Jacquot, a man whose birthyear of 1947 was only one year before The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo, one of the first critical analyses that gave birth to the New Wave, was published. That ostensibly should place Jacquot at least partially in a post-New Wave generation, since many of the movement’s most iconic films came out in either the late fifties or early sixties (e.g., Paris Belongs to Us, The 400 Blows, Breathless , Shoot the Piano Player), while Jacquot himself didn’t really get started helming feature films until the seventies. However, Jacquot’s early career included an extended apprenticeship under one of the more lustrous (if sadly lesser known) names from the New Wave, Marguerite Duras, a director in her own right who is nonetheless probably best remembered for having written Resnais’ classic Hiroshima mon amour. Perhaps due to that connection, as well as to some almost ineffable elements that waft through Jacquot’s films at times, some folks have tried pigeonholing him as a New Wave phenomenon, but Jacquot, while anarchic in his own deliberate way, is more of a formalist than some might typically associate with New Wave sensibilities, and he has in fact even mounted the same kind of historical epic (Farewell, My Queen) that was a particular thorn in the sides of some of the postulants populating the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma back in the day. (It should be noted that Jacquot’s “take” on the historical epic is typically insouciant at times, perhaps indicative of the fact that he probably read some of the barbs aimed at this genre by some of the 1950s French critics.) Jacquot has been curiously underserved on Blu-ray, with only 3 Hearts appearing in addition to the aforementioned Marie Antoinette drama domestically on disc, but Cohen Film Collection is ameliorating that issue with a new release that collects three of Jacquot’s 1990s efforts together.

While almost rigorously formal in a way that would seem on its face to willfully deny some of what the New Wave stood for, 1995’s A Single Girl can nonetheless be seen as one of Jacquot’s most “New Wave-ish” films, at least in tone and a generally loose sensibility about traditional narrative structure. The film plays out in “real time” (at least for the most part), following a young woman named Valérie (Virginie Ledoyen) who, somewhat like Bêth in The Disenchanted, has come to a crossroads. Valérie is just about to begin a new job at a tony luxury hotel, though on a more personal level, she’s dealing with the fact that she’s just found out she’s pregnant by her boyfriend Rémi (Benoît Magimel).

The revelation about her potential maternal status serves as something of a subtext for what then becomes a series of mundane and at times seemingly random interchanges that Valérie experiences on her first day at work. It’s here that Jacquot seems to be crafting an homage of sorts to the free wheeling aesthetic of Godard in works like Breathless, despite the fact that Jacquot indulges in few if any of the playful techniques (like editing) that Godard employed. In fact, that’s one of the more fascinating things about Jacquot’s achievement in A Single Girl, for it both reaffirms and rejects certain elements of the New Wave, virtually simultaneously at times.

Much as with The Disenchanted, A Single Girl depends on the strength of its lead female performance, and Jacquot elicits a fantastically full and nicely nuanced characterization from Virginie Ledoyen. The film perhaps meanders a bit too much, despite its circumscribed time frame and a perhaps questionable coda (removed from the "real time" gambit), but Ledoyen’s luminosity makes the detours unusually compelling almost all of the time.

A Single Girl Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

A Single Girl is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. All three films in the The Benoit Jacquot Collection have been sourced from new 2K restorations, and all three offer elements that are virtually damage free in terms of nicks, scratches or other similar issues. There's a bit more of a verité ambience on display in this film than in the two other films in the Jacquot set, and that may offer at least the perception of increased softness as times, as Valérie tools around the often quite dark and shadowy hallways of the hotel where she's begun to work. There's some slight but recurrent crush at times where elements like Valérie's black hair merges with shaded backgrounds. Some of the exterior location footage also looks just slightly softer at times than the bulk of the presentation. The harsh glare of fluorescent lights in rooms like the kitchen in the hotel offer extremely bright sequences where the image commendably never looks washed out. Detail is often excellent, especially in the many extreme close-ups Jacquot employs throughout the film.

Three additional screenshots in positions 4-6 are available in The Benoit Jacquot Collection Blu-ray review.

A Single Girl Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

A Single Girl features an LPCM 2.0 track in the original French, one which offers some brief but vivid bursts of energy when Valérie ventures out of doors, but which tends to more consistently exploit ambiences like the slightly hollow sound of the cavernous kitchen where Valérie gets room service orders ready for those staying at the hotel. Dialogue is rendered very cleanly and clearly. The brief use of some Dvorak string music sounds clear and precise as well.

A Single Girl Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Feature Length Audio Commentary by Film Critics Wade Major and Tim Cogshell spends some time detailing the collaborators on this film who overlap with other Jacquot films, as well as whether or not Jacquot's real time approach is a "gimmick".


• New Video Interview with Director Benoit Jacquot (1080p; 19:54) is hosted by the New York Film Festival's Kent Jones, who lapses in and out of French (with subtitles). Jacquot mentions how none other than Ingmar Bergman actually inspired this film, as well as Jacquot's own perhaps prurient interests in following a gorgeous young girl around for a couple of hours.


• Original Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1:46)


• 2015 Re-release Trailer (1080p; 1:21)

A Single Girl Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Fans of the French New Wave who haven't yet experienced the films of Jacquot could probably find no easier entrée into the director's work than A Single Girl. The film is built out of seeming minutiae, but it ends up building up some significant momentum, even if Jacquot potentially squanders some of it by tacking on a perhaps needless coda. Technical merits are generally excellent, and A Single Girl comes Recommended.