7.6 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
Monsieur Hire is a maladjusted, balding, middle-aged man living in France. He doesn't like to talk to people. A young woman is murdered and a police detective suspects M. Hire, just because his neighbors think he is strange.
Starring: Michel Blanc, Sandrine BonnaireForeign | 100% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Crime | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
French: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
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 |
Cohen Media Group doesn't always include a bunch of extras on its Blu-ray releases, and so both the commentary track by Wade Major and a fun
set of interviews with director Patrice Leconte and star Sandrine Bonnaire that are included with this release are especially welcome, and they
provide a lot of interesting background information on this film which is regularly cited as one of the classics from that era of French film (and
perhaps beyond). As Wade Major gets into, and Patrice Leconte kind of amusingly if obliquely refers to, Georges Simenon's source novel Les
Fiançailles de M. Hire had come out in 1933 and then kind of incredibly didn't get just one, but two*, adaptations, both released at
almost the same time in two (actually three) different countries! What seems to be a Portuguese film called Viela, Rua Sem Sol came out in
September 1947 according to the IMDb, and if I'm reading things correctly, was soon released in Spain under the title Barrio. French folks got their own "native" adaptation courtesy of a Julien Duvivier outing
called Panique, one which caught the eye of Patrice Leconte, though as he
amusingly recounts, he wasn't paying attention during the credits and so had missed the fact that the film was based on a Simenon novel. He long
thought about simply remaking Panique until a friend pointed out the Simenon genesis and suggested merely making a new adaptation of
the source novel might be a better path forward. It may sound like it's more or less the same thing, but Leconte seems to suggest it
gave him new insight about how to proceed with his version.
*If I understood his comments correctly, Major mentions three adaptations in his commentary, but I think maybe he accounted for Viela, Rua
Sem Sol and Barrio as
two separate films, when it seems to me they're the same under different titles.
Monsieur Hire is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection, an imprint of Cohen Media Group, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. (Cohen Film Collection has its own sub-imprint, Classics of French Cinema, and this release is further branded that way.) The film begins with a brief text card announcing the restoration in 2020 done by Pathé in 4K. This is a pretty stunning looking transfer a lot of the time, though it is intentionally on the cool side quite often, with an emphasis on green and blue tones which Leconte actually explicitly addresses, if briefly, in the interview included on this disc as a supplement. That tendency toward not pushing things in a warmer direction can lead to almost desaturated moments, as in the very opening vignette documenting the body and the Inspector. Things do warm up appreciably in some later sequences, including several scenes that feature a kind of buttery yellow tone, though quite a few scenes still have pale flesh tones and a decidedly wintry (or at least autumnal without the bright leaf colors) look, and I personally wouldn't have complained with just a bit more vivid suffusion generally speaking. Grain is very tightly resolved throughout the presentation.
Monsieur Hire features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track in the original French. The film's sound design isn't especially baroque, though there are occasional nice bursts of sound effects, as in the big thunderstorm where Alice finally sees Hire spying on her. Michael Nyman's score sounds great throughout, and all dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly. In the broken record department, this is just the latest release of a foreign language title by Cohen where they've chosen to force subtitles (meaning the English subtitles are not optional).
Monsieur Hire is touted both in some reviews and on Wade Major's commentary track as "Hitchcockian", but while it does offer some of the psychological suspense that Hitchcock's films often did, along with a perhaps unfairly maligned protagonist, as Hitchcock's films also often did, it has its own incredibly distinctive flavor, and I'd say in some ways it ends up being more disturbing than your "average" Hitchcock movie, if I might be permitted a brief moment of heresy. Technical merits are solid, and the supplements very enjoyable, though I sure do wish Cohen would start offering optional subtitles. Highly recommended.
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