7.7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
A German stage actor finds unexpected success and mixed blessings in the popularity of his performance in a Faustian play as the Nazis take power in pre-WWII Germany. As his associates and friends flee or are ground under by the Nazi terror, the popularity of his character supercedes his own existence until he finds that his best performance is keeping up appearances for his Nazi patrons.
Starring: Klaus Maria Brandauer, Krystyna Janda, Ildikó Bánsági, Rolf Hoppe, György CserhalmiForeign | 100% |
Melodrama | Insignificant |
Period | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.66:1
German: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
Hungarian: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono
English
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
Ronald Coleman won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his work in 1947s A Double Life, a film built around the conceit of an actor portraying Othello who slowly begins to think he actually is Othello. Mephisto plies at least somewhat the same territory, albeit arguably with considerably more nuance and inarguably more irony, as Klaus Maria Brandauer portrays an actor named Hendrik Höfgen who works in Germany just as the Nazi regime is starting to achieve significant power. One of Höfgens dream roles is that of Mephisto in a production of Faust, and while he indeed is able to realize that dream, it actually turns out to be a nightmare when Höfgen realizes that all that he has forsaken in order to achieve that dream has actually made him more Faust than Faust's "seducer". It may sound almost deliberately trite, but this underlying tension actually provides the film with considerable impact, especially due to Brandauer's riveting performance. Mephisto was the first film from Hungary to win an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and its an often disturbing look at a perhaps slightly pathetic, needy man who gets caught up in the epochal changes wrought by a nefarious sociopolitical movement. As Samm Deighan gets into in her interesting commentary included on this disc as a supplement, the film was culled from a novel by Klaus Mann, the openly gay son of Thomas Mann who also had a recurrent drug problem, two things that colored both his life in general as well as his reaction to the uprising of the Nazis. Klaus Mann was stripped of his German citizenship relatively early in the Nazi era, and all of these elements may have played into Mann's deconstruction of the Nazi mythos in his original novel. There's also some interesting "meta" data courtesy of the fact that Mann reportedly based his book at least partially on the life of his brother-in-law Gustaf Gründgens, who ironically would play Mephistopheles in the 1960 film version of Faust, but who is perhaps better remembered from his role in Fritz Lang's M.
Mephisto is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Kino Lorber's Kino Classics imprint with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.66:1. The back cover of this release touts a "stunning 4K restoration by the Hungarian National Film Archive", and in this case the hyperbole is not that overstated. While there are a few minor blemishes that have managed to evade the clean up, and color temperature can be just slightly variant at times, the overall look here is beautifully organic and almost always nicely suffused. Fine detail is often impressive, especially in some close- ups, though in that regard, the film's more stylized aspects, as in the now famous closing couple of moments, don't necessarily support superb fine detail levels by design. I noticed no compression anomalies.
Mephisto features DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono tracks in German and Hungarian. The tracks didn't differ substantially to my ears in terms of overall mix, other than the obvious differences in language. There is unavoidably "loose sync" here at times in both languages due to this or that actor being dubbed, but fidelity is fine, supporting both spoken and musical moments perfectly capably. Optional English subtitles are available.
Update: Mephisto arrived before the two other István Szabó films Kino Lorber has also released on Blu-ray, and so I didn't initially realize that all three releases repeat some of the same supplements.
There may be some diehard Dudley Moore fans who might take issue with this, but I am personally kind of stunned that Klaus Maria Brandauer didn't receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his work in this film (and I'm singling Moore out as the most likely "candidate" to be replaced in a year that saw legends Warren Beatty, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman and eventual winner Henry Fonda nominated in that category). Brandauer's captivating and disturbing performance is matched by Hoppe's, and the supporting cast is similarly excellent. The film also manages to capture its epochal era superbly. The underlying premise of Mephisto is as hoary as the Faust legend itself, but that doesn't make it any less powerful and relevant. Technical merits are solid and the supplementary package enjoyable, and Mephisto comes Highly recommended.
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