6.3 | / 10 |
Users | 3.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 3.8 |
After a childhood in Los Angeles. Martin returned to Paris to join his father following his parents' separation. Now, Martin must revisit the past as he winds up his mother's affairs after her death. Overcome by grief, Martin leaves L.A. for Tijuana on the trail of Lola, a Mexican woman he knew as a child, and who held a special place in his mother's heart.
Starring: Mathieu Demy, Salma Hayek, Geraldine Chaplin, Chiara Mastroianni, Carlos BardemDrama | 100% |
Foreign | 64% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
French: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English, English SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
In a signature line from David Lynch's twisted coming-of-age film, Blue Velvet, the young hero is told, "I can't figure out if you're a detective or a pervert." The same could be said for Martin, the protagonist of director, writer and star Mathieu Demy's Americano, a deceptively simple tale about a forty-ish man who makes unexpected discoveries while dealing with the death of his mother. Because Demy is the son of two fabled French directors, Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and Agnès Varda (One Sings, The Other Doesn't), too many reviewers have viewed Americano solely through the prisms of his parents' works. Having been raised in a family steeped in cinema, Demy has obviously made a film bearing the stamp of that heritage; how could it not? Demy even incorporates clips from his mother's 1981 film Documenteur, where he appeared at age nine playing a boy named "Martin", whose childhood is similar to the memories of Martin in Americano. (Steven Soderbergh used a similar device in 1991's The Limey, where clips from a 32-year-old film starring Terence Stamp represented the memories of Stamp's current character, now much older.) But children are never mere carbon copies of their parents, and Americano is far more than a hybrid of the styles of Demy's parents. Demy's life and cinematic experience range far beyond his parents' films. Among other things, he has absorbed the casual genre-hopping and plotbending that have become almost second nature to confident filmmakers in the last 30 years. The result is a film that repeatedly and unexpectedly changes direction, although Demy, like all good storytellers, never loses sight of where he started and eventually gets back there. Even when he's doing something that invokes the family tradition, Demy does it his way. As he says in the intriguing interview included on the disc, Demy asked Catherine Deneuve's daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, to play his love interest in Americano not only because Deneuve was his father's favorite actress, but also because he and Mastroianni have known each other for a long time and he admires her as an actress—she's his generation.
Grainophobes, beware! I am giving MPI Media's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray of Americano high marks for video, and any member of Blu-ray.com's discussion forum who wonders how that can possibly be, in light of the screenshots, obviously hasn't read this explanation. My primary criterion for a Blu-ray image is accuracy, and the Blu-ray of Americano accurately reproduces the film's image. That image comes from two sources:
The Blu-ray's DTS-HD MA 5.1 track beautifully recreates Americano's distinctive and subtly engineered soundtrack. Demy may not have any action scenes to work with, but that doesn't stop him from using the full resources of modern motion picture sound technology to express Martin's inner state. The film's sound routinely shifts between real and unreal, often without warning and by subtle transition. When Martin first hears Lola sing, the sound goes wildly out of synch and eventually her lips stop moving altogether; as the camera moves toward Martin, it becomes obvious that what he's hearing (and possibly seeing) differs from what's happening on the stage. When Martin arrives at the Los Angeles morgue to sign a release for his mother's body, he is escorted down a long hall by a sepulchral mortician who seems to be ushering him to the grave. As Martin approaches his "destination", everything drops away but the sounds of fluorescent lights buzzing and Martin breathing, and these grow to dominate the track as an embalmed body appears out of focus in the background. Gradually, however, another sonic presence announces itself in the background of the track, and at first you're not quite sure what it is. As the balance shifts, you realize that it's musical, familiar and wholly out of character with the sober piano score by Grégoire Hetzel (Incendies) that has dominated the soundtrack until that point. It's a pop song I won't identify, because that would be something of a spoiler. The song signals a change in the film's direction, like a switch going off in Martin's head. A few scenes later, it has been reduced to source music on a radio. Americano has its share of typical environmental sound cues, especially in the Tijuana scenes and local hangouts, but the truly memorable sonic elements are all of an expressive quality such as those described above (including an elaborate sequence of crosscutting near the end). It's a first-rate track.
Americano is an impressive debut by a thoughtful filmmaker with a notable ability to use his artistic heritage without being overwhelmed by it. In academic circles, the term "anxiety of influence" has been used to describe a syndrome in which an artist's terror of repeating past works leads to paralysis. If Demy ever suffered from this condition, there is no evidence of it in Americano. An assured work that moves to its own rhythm, the film tells an intriguing story while playfully acknowledging (and reckoning with) the family business to date. After spending much of the film wishing to be somewhere else, Martin speaks volumes at the end when he says, simply, "I'm here." Clearly so is Demy. Highly recommended.
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