Maison Close: Season Two Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Maison Close: Season Two Blu-ray Movie Review

Evidently maison closed is more like it.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 25, 2016

Maison Close is inarguably one of the more stylish series to have washed up on the shores of the United States (at least on Blu-ray if not in an original broadcast iteration) from across the pond, but unfortunately it’s a stylishness that is not always in concert with the actual content of the show. Glitzy, glamorous and full of the kind of tufted red velvet ambience that also informed Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, Maison Close seems to want to have its historical cake while also eating a more modern, revisionist morsel or two. As I mentioned in the Maison Close: Season One Blu-ray review, the series is almost deliberately disjunctive as it accompanies stories of 19th century Parisian “working girls” with music that is resolutely modern. It’s an approach that has also been utilized in other historically themed enterprises (one thinks of similar gambits in shows like Hell On Wheels: The Complete First Season, another show that, like Maison Close, shares at least part of its production and/or distribution aggregation with Entertainment One), but here it’s more “in your face”, as the music frequently plays under scenes that have little to no dialogue. That disconnect may be one reason why the show’s ratings evidently tanked precipitously during its second season, leading to the series’ eventual cancellation. Those who got caught up in Maison Close’s sometimes florid melodrama during its first season will find much (maybe more) of the same in this second year, but the show is often a kind of bumpy ride that shows regular signs of style battling substance rather than working in tandem with it.

There are some interesting comments on Maison Close’s second season by scriptwriters Cécile Ducrocq and Franck Philippon in the insert booklet included in this two disc Blu-ray set, which are excerpted here:

Maison Close is a series about women and their fragile destinies in a world of power and violence governed by men.

After a first season that centered on confinement, we wanted to highlight the struggle of our heroines after their emancipation.

. . .[W]e wanted our characters and viewers to plunge into a “Scorcesian” environment. We created a real urban western where the brothel serves as a saloon in which sheriffs and frontier bandits fight it out.

Ducrocq and Philippon go on to aver that the show is nonetheless told resolutely from a female perspective, especially with regard to one of this season’s central conceits, a kind of détente that exists between the working girls of the brothel and an interloping gang of “thugs” (as the insert booklet notes repeatedly refer to them) who take up residence in the Paradis. That said, some viewers may at least question what exactly a "Scorcesian" environment is, especially when one considers the supposed historical milieu of the series.

The second season actually begins with the startling image of an obviously disheveled and perhaps mentally unbalanced woman staring directly at the camera and calling someone a “filthy whore”. The upshot of the scene ultimately seems to almost be a revisiting of the first season’s arc which involved Rose (Jemima West) coming to the brothel to supposedly investigate what happened to her long estranged mother. While the addled woman beginning season two is in fact related to one of the working girls at the Paradis, the series at least doesn’t completely retread territory it’s already explored, instead delving into the disconnect between appearance (i.e., those who would see the prostitutes as “filthy whores”) and reality (i.e., entrepreneurial women attempting to make it—so to speak—on their own terms).

What’s a little disingenuous about this formulation is how both seasons of Maison Close posit a kind of overweening male presence that repeatedly thrusts obstacles in the way of Hortense (Valérie Karsenti). This season’s villainous man is arch criminal Louis Mosca (Michaël Cohen), whose gang takes up residence at the brothel after he more or less assumes control, despite the fact that one of the second season’s supposed plot points is that the women of the brothel are now “self governing”. It may be (more or less) historically accurate (one tends to wonder about this more often than not due to Maison Close’s stylistic proclivities), but as a purely mechanical plot issue, it becomes too predictable to ultimately pay many dramatic dividends.

The shift to 1873 as this season starts may mean something to Francophiles, but will probably not rise to the level of being a salient plot point for many, despite some explanatory prefacing as the second season begins. The more salient context is probably going to be a “meta” one, where fans of the show have to decide if they want to invest even more time in a show which has already ceased production. That becomes especially relevant when one considers the fact that the second season doesn’t exactly go out of its way to tie up various hanging plot threads.

Maison Close: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Maison Close: Season Two is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Music Box Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1 (a wider, ostensibly more "cinematic" aspect ratio than season one's 1.78:1). As I also mentioned in our Maison Close: Season One Blu-ray review, things have a tendency to look a bit flat quite a bit of the time throughout this presentation, largely due to the fact that so much of the show takes place in hazily lit indoor environments. Softness also tends to creep in courtesy of diffused lighting schemes and a recurrent tendency to shoot directly into light, something that often bathes scenes in a kind of effulgent gauziness (see screenshots 3 and 17). The series tends to be color graded fairly heavily a lot of the time as well, with both cool blue tones and a more ubiquitous kind of honey yellow scheme informing a lot of sequences. There are also a number of peculiar gambits employed, including brightness and/or contrast pushed to the point where detail all but disappears (see screenshot 9), a stylistic approach that doesn't ever really add any contextual support. All of this said, detail is still rather good in close-ups, where elements like the fine fabrics of the costumes or even pores on skin are easily visible. Slight dustings of noise occasionally creep into some of the more dimly lit scenes.

Maison Close: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Maison Close: Season Two features a nice sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track (in the original French, with optional English subtitles). Much as with the first season, surround activity perks up considerably courtesy of the (at times overused) source cues, as well as some of the more raucous "party" scenes that take place within the brothel. This season really doesn't venture out of doors all that much, but on the occasions it does, there's good attention paid to placing ambient environmental effects directionally to create a lifelike atmosphere. Dialogue is delivered cleanly and clearly, though occasionally can take a prioritization back seat to some of those aforementioned source cues.

Maison Close: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Season One (1080p; 00:49) is a brief trailer for the series' first year.

Maison Close: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's a lot of interesting material wafting through Maison Close, and the frank (if somewhat circumspect) depiction of various sexual activities may be enough to interest those with prurient tendencies. But I really have to wonder how many people are going to be willing to sit through quite a bit of melodrama knowing full well that things aren't going to ultimately get resolved in any meaningful way due to the series' cancellation. Technical merits are generally strong for those considering a purchase.