6.9 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Monique Mélinand portrays a woman in the late stages of terminal illness. She — and her prone body — become the locus around which gather her son Philippe (Philippe Léotard), his wife Nathalie (Nathalie Baye), and Monique’s husband Roger (Hubert Deschamps). In short order, Monique recedes into the background of Philippe’s and Roger’s network of respective adulteries. But as the final, crushingly eloquent succession of shots starts to unreel, we are once more reminded that, in the work of Maurice Pialat, that which seems absent ultimately makes its presence felt with terrible force.
Starring: Hubert Deschamps, Philippe Léotard, Monique Mélinand, Nathalie BayeForeign | 100% |
Drama | 77% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.75:1
French: Dolby Digital 2.0
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
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.
Life is what you doThe line was so trenchant, in fact, that when the musical was revived decades after its original Broadway run (this time with Anthony Quinn singing and dancing in the title role), that second half of the thesis was changed to “‘til the moment you die”. Personally, the first formulation seems more properly fatalistic in an authentic Greek way than the somewhat bowdlerized second version, and the first iteration might be a near perfect epigraph for at least part of what is happening in the often sad and, yes, trenchant The Mouth Agape.
While you’re waiting to die.
La Gueule ouverte is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.66:1. This is probably the grainiest looking of the three features offered in The Films of Maurice Pialat: Volume 1, with a gritty, textured quality that almost assumes the look of Super 16 at times (the IMDb lists this as having been shot on 35mm). That actually only tends to support the film's verité ambience, something that legendary cinematographer Nestor Almendros' "fly on the wall" framings also help to achieve. The many hospital scenes have a somewhat bluish tint, while a lot of scenes in the bedroom where Monique spends her last days are somewhat ironically honey hued. Blacks are slightly milky which in addition to some slightly undercooked contrast leads to minimal shadow detail in some dark and/or nighttime scenes. Densities are consistent and there is no damage of any kind to report.
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:
If you need a break from reading Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' On Death and Dying, my advice is to stick with some film other than The Mouth Agape. This is a pretty devastating treatment of end of life issues filtered through a rather uniquely French perspective that includes sexual dalliances and two generations of family dysfunction. Never "fun" to watch, but almost hypnotically compelling, The Mouth Agape comes Highly recommended.
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