6.8 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
A group of young actors including several local unknowns – Philippe Marlaud, Bernard Tronczyk, Patrick Lepczynski, and Sabine Haudepin (once the little girl of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim), among others – make up the cluster of friends adrift beneath the twilight of their school years. There’s drama, violence, and pot-induced laughs – group holidays, indiscriminate sex, advances from teachers twenty-five years their seniors, attempted moves to Paris, and few prospects of passing the bac, the final set of exams French students take before embarking into the world to… do what?
Starring: Sabine Haudepin, Philippe Marlaud, Annick AlaneForeign | 100% |
Drama | 83% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.66:1
French: Dolby Digital 2.0
English
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Note: This film is available as part of The Films of Maurice Pialat: Volume 1.
In my recent Death
Walks Twice: Two Films by Luciano Ercoli Blu-ray review, I mentioned how it’s likely that talking about giallo to even the most
ardent film buff would probably result in a response offering only one of two names, Dario Argento or Mario Bava. Similarly, if one were to ask
a film fan to name a French director whose work spanned the 1960s through the 1980s, my hunch is most folks would tend to gravitate
toward iconic names like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut or Claude Chabrol. Nouvelle Vague so famously subsumed so much of
modern (meaning post-World War II) French cinema that some creatives (like Chabrol in fact) found themselves akin to square pegs being (or
at least attempted at being) thrust into round holes. Maurice Pialat is not a name known to many Western film lovers, even those
who consider themselves Francophiles, and it’s interesting to note that Pialat often works in a style that would frankly make him more at
home with his nearby European neighbors, the Italians, since Pialat frequently favors a neorealistic approach that is long on character, gritty
verisimilitude, and a sometimes lax approach toward traditional plot structure and three act “arcs”. Pialat also tends to eschew some of the
stylistic flourishes that populate the Nouvelle Vague catalog, especially in terms of editing. Instead of, well, Breathless cutting (sorry), Pialat often indulges in long, drawn out single takes that
allow his actors to fully explore the nuances of their characters, even if at times dialogue is fitfully minimal. It’s a technique that immediately
puts Pialat at odds with many of his (more) famous contemporaries, and may account at least in part for Pialat’s strange lack of recognition
on this side of the pond. Cohen Film Collection, quickly becoming a haven for cineastes (if it hasn’t already), is helping to ameliorate that
problem by releasing a trio of Pialat’s work spanning from 1974 to 1980, along with a revealing documentary about the director.
Graduate First is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.66:1. This is another very appealing looking transfer, with just a couple of minor issues for the most demanding videophiles to be aware of. The palette is a bit drab by design throughout the film, though there are momentary pops of vivid hues like a rainbow blouse a character wears or a bright red Che Guevara poster gracing one character's bedroom, but things look natural throughout the presentation. Some seaside scenes pop especially well, and in fact when the film ventures out of doors (which it does quite often), detail levels are at least incrementally increased. There are a few minor deficits in some dark scenes, with, for example, very minimal crush in attendance in some of the early scenes in the cafe, where things like black jackets can blend into already dark backgrounds. This has a noticeably lighter grainfield than La Gueule ouverte, but things still look natural and nicely organic throughout. As with La Gueule ouverte, there are no signs of damage.
Perhaps surprisingly all three features in The Films of Maurice Pialat: Volume 1 sport Dolby Digital 2.0 mono tracks. The French release of Loulou, the only Pialat film in this set to have appeared previously on Blu-ray, featured a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track. As longtime readers of my Cohen reviews know, I took the label to task for their earlier authoring of discs which tended to default to lossy Dolby Digital tracks rather than also included lossless tracks, but in this case there are no lossless tracks. That's ultimately not a huge deal, given the relatively small scale sonic ambitions of all three films, though it's at least arguable that the Mozart quotes in La Gueule ouverte might have gained a bit of "oomph" in a lossless setting. Dialogue and effects are both rendered cleanly on all three tracks, with no damage of any kind to warrant concern.
Cohen has spread the three feature films and supplements across the three discs in this set in a somewhat unusual way. The Mouth Agape and Graduate First share one BD-50 with no supplemental content, while Loulou is on its own BD-50 with its supplemental features. The third disc contains the following content:
Some folks may be wishing for more of a pronounced narrative thrust in Graduate First, but its very aimlessness seems to echo the profound uncertainty that its teenaged cast is facing. The film works better as an almost Slacker-esque set of interlocking vignettes, and also needs to be taken on its own deliberately "mundane" terms. For those willing to surrender to the film's somewhat depressive charms, Graduate First comes Highly recommended.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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1969
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1949
Hamnstad
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1973
Kvinnodröm
1955
Gycklarnas afton
1953
Skepp till Indialand / A Ship Bound for India
1947
1958
2017
Wind from the East
1970
A Film Like Any Other
1968
1978
La notte di San Lorenzo
1982
Till glädje
1950
Κινέττα
2005
Alice in den Städten
1974
2014