Entre Nous Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Entre Nous Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 28, 2022

While Entre Nous is obviously a French term, this film actually started life as Coup de Foudre, which is a French colloquialism often used to describe so-called "love at first sight". In that regard, it might be salient to wonder whether the attraction in this film is between an eventual husband and wife or between that wife and what might be described as her BFF. Whatever one calls it, Entre Nous served as a catharsis of sorts for co-writer and director Diane Kurys, who is on hand in a very interesting interview included on this disc as a supplement which actually might be a good place for some viewers unacquainted with this film to start, since it gives some context and actual personal history that is part and parcel of the film itself.

One of the kind of interesting things about the interview with Kurys is how she discusses being downright surprised by a number of historical facts that she uncovered while preparing this film. She recounts having been told perhaps somewhat odd "bedtime stories" by her parents about their escape from the Nazis during World War II, but she was perhaps less aware of the fact that her parents also escaped French captors, albeit lackeys of the Vichy collaborationists. Kurys also mentions the largely unknown or least unremembered fact that Italians actually occupied a large swath of France during part of World War II. Some of these aspects may not be overly important to the general tale Kurys tells, but they add a bit of "flavor", as it were, and help to establish a rather interesting perspective on events that probably too often are pigeonholed into "traditional" war movie genres.

The film opens with Lena Weber (Isabelle Huppert) arriving at an internment camp which is in fact being run by the Vichy regime. She's obviously distraught, though she soon catches the eye of another inmate, Michel Korski (Guy Marchand), who, despite the camp keeping the men and women separate, manages to "reach out", if vicariously, and connect with Lena. The upshot of this opening set of vignettes is that Lena, perhaps against her better judgment, agrees to marry Michel when he offers her an escape route of sorts. In a scene which may bring to mind a certain former nun and her new Baron husband, Lena and Michel traipse over the Alps to get to freedom, and when the film segues to the early fifties, they're ensconced in Lyon with two adorable daughters.

In the meantime, the film has already, if kind of briefly and interstitially, introduced the other focal female of the story, Madeleine (Miou-Miou). If Lena has been shown marrying more or less for convenience, Madeleine's early history is more fraught with outright tragedy, with the result that by the time she meets Lena in Lyon, she's on her second marriage, to a guy named Costa (Jean-Pierre Bacri). Entre Nous then begins to dissect the growing friendship between these two women, as well as the effects that has on their marriages (arguably more so with regard to Lena than with regard to Madeleine), all within the context of an era when women were supposedly proscribed by what society would allow them to do or how much (overt?) control they could have over their own lives.

I found Kurys' comments to be quite illuminating in terms of the background of her parents (that would be Lena and Michel, lest that not be clear), but even given her comments, there are perhaps some disjunctive elements between her recounting of her history and the assumedly fictionalized version that plays out on the screen. There are also some elisions at play in the story, where certain intimations (that term is used deliberately) are hinted at in terms of the relationship between Lena and Madeleine, and yet nothing is ever really spelled out or even strongly alluded to. The weirdest thing about the story is the perhaps unexpected dissolution of the relationship between Lena and Michel. Kurys makes the case that her parents basically despised each other, but that's not how she depicts things in the film, at least not consistently.

There's an undeniably melancholic aspect to much of this tale, aside and apart from any actual mental and/or emotional illness that it turns out Madeleine may be suffering from. The film almost makes a case that even those who might not have experienced the most nightmarish horrors the Holocaust had to offer still came through the experience highly traumatized, and in fact the film might also make the case that anyone having survived a World War might come away scarred by the experience. The film evidently worked its cathartic magic (?) for Kurys, at least as evidenced by some of her comments in the interview included on this disc, and if it's not quite as powerful to "outsiders", it's still an often compelling look at two women attempting to forge their own identities under calamitous circumstances.

Entre Nous Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Entre Nous is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection, an imprint of Cohen Media Group, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. (As has been the case with a number of Cohen Film Collection releases lately, this also bears a "sub imprint" of Classics of French Cinema). The front cover advertises a "new 4K restoration" without providing any further information (this is one of several recent releases from Cohen which also bear a StudioCanal masthead, but I haven't been able to find anything even on StudioCanal's website about any of the releases, at least with regard to any restoration efforts). This is another largely very pleasing looking transfer that features good saturation for the most part and often appealing detail levels. There are some passing oddities with fine detail levels in scenes featuring rapid movements (e.g., a character wearing a corduroy jacket in one scene moves his arm quickly, and the ridges on his sleeve kind of momentarily disappear). There are also some varying color temperatures on display (some scenes seem slightly skewed toward cooler blue or even blue-green, while other moments look a bit on the yellow side), as well as a few passing changes in densities. Grain resolves nicely for the most part, occasionally looking a bit rough and yellowish in some opticals (as in the opening credits).

Entre Nous Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Entre Nous features a well wrought LPCM 2.0 Mono track in the original French. A somewhat plaintive score by Luis Enríquez Bacalov sounds fine throughout, and dialogue and occasional sound effects (mostly ambient environmental sounds) are rendered without any issues whatsoever. This is another release from Cohen of a foreign language film where the disc has been authored with forced English subtitles.

Entre Nous Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Interview with Director Diane Kurys (HD; 38:00) is a really worthwhile piece, full of background information, and, as mentioned above, perhaps even a good place to start with this release. Subtitled in English.

Entre Nous Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Entre Nous means "between us", for those who may not already know, but that kind of begs the same question that Coup de Foudre does, in terms of which "us" is being referred to. This is a really interesting examination of a relationship between two women that goes in some unexpected directions, though I have to say some of those unexpected directions might be the result of inadequate delineation in the screenplay. Nonetheless, this is a film with some captivating performances, and the tragic trajectory of the story has a perhaps surprisingly resilient moral in that Kurys, like her own parents, survived to tell the tale. Technical merits are generally solid, and the interview with Kurys very interesting. Recommended.