6.4 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Anne, a well-off, Paris-based mother of two and investigative journalist for ELLE, is writing an article about student prostitution. Her meetings with two fiercely independent young women, Alicja and Charlotte, are profound and unsettling, moving her to question her most intimate convictions about money, family and sex.
Starring: Juliette Binoche, Anaïs Demoustier, Joanna Kulig, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Krystyna JandaForeign | 100% |
Drama | 77% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.36:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
French: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
French: LPCM 2.0
English
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 3.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
There's nothing new about the world's oldest profession, and perhaps that's part of the reason why most critics have characterized the sex-work- centric Elles as banal. The film does deal with some well-worn themes—flesh as a commodity, prostitution as a means for upward mobility, and the simultaneous empowerment and subjugation of women who sell their bodies for a living—but I'll be contrarian and say that if lacking in originality, Polish writer/director Małgorzata Szumowska handles the familiar material with an intoxicating mix of intelligence and uncomfortable eroticism. A graduate of the National Film School in Łódź, Szumowska—like her fellow alumni Roman Polanski and Krzysztof Kieślowski—often indulges a fondness for visual symbolism as a means of expressing unspoken emotional and philosophical complexity. While she might not have the subtlety of the two Polish cinema legends—there are indeed a few too-obvious allusions in Elles—Szumowska's style is bracing, using minimalist compositions and jarring cuts, often back-scored by baroque classical music cues. Just don't let the NC-17 rating and lurid subject matter fool into thinking you're in for some arthouse titillation. Yes, the film straddles the line between sensual and explicit, but for every steamy scene, there's at least two more of depressive middle-class malaise.
Elles was shot digitally and features a strong but not quite perfect Blu-ray presentation, with a 1080p/AVC encode that's decently sharp but occasionally suffers from slight compression artifacts. First the good: Szumowska's visual approach—with cinematographer Michal Englert—is simple and evocative, featuring careful compositions, lovely shallow depth-of-field, and a color palette that's appropriately muted and neutral inside Anne's home but warmer and more vivid outside. The image has a great sense of density and dimensionality; black levels are deep, highlights are softened, and color is rich but never overblown. Although there's some softness in darker scenes, the in-focus areas of the frame usually have a fine degree of clarity, with visible skin textures, individually discernible hairs, and plenty of detail in the characters' clothing. (What little clothing there sometimes is.) And now the not-so-good: Besides the sometimes patchy source noise that peppers darker interior scenes, you will spot some pixilation/artifacting in some shots, and one—with Binoche in the shower, see the screenshot above—even seems to suffer from harsh macroblocking. I'm not sure what the ultimate cause of this might be, but it's fleeting and not really noticeable from a normal viewing distance. Still, worth noting. At least there's no DNR or edge enhancement. Aside from these compression hiccups, Elles looks wonderful.
Kino Lorber has given us two audio options here, the default lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround mix, and an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 track. The latter is perfectly acceptable, but if you've got a multi-channel setup, you should definitely stick with the former, which is surprisingly immersive considering the nature of the film. I mean, this is no action movie—so you won't hear cross-channel effects galore—but the sound design smartly uses all six speakers to generate an engaging and sometimes very realistic sense of place. Paris traffic noise. The insects and birds of a sunny park. Rain pouring in sheets. Wind in the trees. The chatter in a student admissions center. The oppressive noise of a violent video game. It's all full and rich, and sounds great with the volume turned up a bit. Supplementing the ambience are occasional classical cues from Vivaldi and Beethoven, and—in one memorable scene—a sultry number from Swedish electro duo The Knife. Dialogue always cuts cleanly through the mix, and for those who speak French, the default English subtitles—which appear in easy to read white lettering—can be removed.
Elles didn't get much love from critics during its limited U.S. theatrical release, but I found it provocative, uneasy, and sensual—a rare mature treatment of adult sexuality and social class distinctions. As expected, Juliet Binoche delivers a characteristically impressive performance, this time as a bored middle-class journalist who falls under the spell of the upwardly mobile prostitutes she's interviewing for her latest piece. Kino Lorber's Blu-ray presentation is decent, with a flawed-but-strong picture and surprisingly immersive audio—for such a relatively quiet, dialogue-driven film—but the lack of special features will probably put this one in the "rent" rather than "buy" category for most. The exception will be diehard Binoche fans, who will certainly want to add Elles to their collections.
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