Queen + Béjart: Ballet for Life Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Queen + Béjart: Ballet for Life Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 1, 2019

Are there too many notes in the air? In a kind of weird concatenation of otherwise totally different titles, two disparate releases with a bit of a Mozartian flair have passed through my review queue over the past week or so. The Academy Award winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs has both covert and overt references to Wolfgang Amadeus, and now this interesting amalgamation of a 1997 performance of Ballet for Life and two documentaries about it also features Mozart’s music, though it may be the music of another “M”, namely Freddie Mercury and Queen, which may make this a must have, at least those still swooning from Bohemian Rhapsody.

Given the fact that Ballet for Life offered the blandishments of Mercury, Queen and Mozart, along with costumes by some guy named Versace or something, might mean that the ballet’s actual creator and choregrapher, Maurice Béjart gets short shrift in the eyes of those more acquainted with the worlds of music and fashion than dance. But Béjart’s vision was to craft an elegy of sorts, both to Freddie Mercury as well as Béjart’s muse and partner, dancer Jorge Donn, who each suffered deaths at the hands of the AIDS epidemic.

The ballet is an interesting enough piece, and it’s certainly energetic, but the actual main point of interest here may well be the two documentaries built around it. There’s a contemporary piece by Lynne Wake and Simon Lupton that has a lot of background information and a ton of talking head interviews with a number of the creative crew (including the seemingly inescapable Brian May and Roger Taylor). An archival documentary is also included which has some interesting behind the scenes footage of the piece being put together, as well as then contemporary interviews with many of the same subjects.

Queen + Béjart: Ballet for Life Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Queen + Béjart: Ballet for Life is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Eagle Vision, an imprint of Eagle Rock Entertainment, Universal Music, Queen and The Mercury Phoenix Trust with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer, with the contemporary footage appearing in 1.78:1. The site's automatic aspect ratio tool is reporting a kind of unusual 1.47:1 aspect ratio for both some of the archival video in the contemporary documentary, as well as the ballet presentation itself. As might be expected, especially since the standalone ballet and accompanying 1997 making of documentary are in standard definition, there's some pretty widely variant video quality even in the "current day" documentary, since it uses so much footage from the ballet and other archival sources. The contemporary footage looks nicely sharp and well detailed, with a decent if slightly cool looking palette. The archival video, which also includes the standalone ballet and the 1997 documentary, is frankly pretty ragged looking, prone to everything from blooming whites to pretty noticeable ghosting, quite a few combing artifacts in fast movement, and some lackluster levels of fine detail.

Queen + Béjart: Ballet for Life Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

All of the features on this disc offer LPCM 2.0 audio. While that's probably a letdown for the ballet fans, who might have like all that music in a surround version, fidelity here is excellent across the board in both the contemporary documentary and the two archival pieces included on this disc. All of the talking head material comes through with perfect clarity, and while some of the archival performance footage of Freddie and Queen has occasional inherited anomalies, for the most part even the "old" stuff sounds remarkably spry and solid.

Queen + Béjart: Ballet for Life Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This is another one of those releases where, as I've stated before in other reviews, "one man's supplement is another man's main feature", though the fact that the ballet and the 1997 documentary are in standard definition may hint that Eagle Rock at least thinks of the 2017 documentary as the main feature. That said, I'll list the complete contents of the disc and let everyone decide what's what for him or herself:

• The Documentary (2017) (1080i; 58:42)


• The Ballet (1997) (480i; 1:32:02)


• The Making Of (1997) (480i; 23:37)

Eagle Rock has packaged this rather nicely, in what might be called a DigiBook, though it's not in the "traditional" size of the format. This one measures about 7 3/4" x 5 1/2".

Queen + Béjart: Ballet for Life Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It may be just a tad bit ironic that a lot of younger fans may be more prone to "remember" Freddie Mercury courtesy of efforts like Bohemian Rhapsody. This nice amalgamation of two documentaries and a live performance of a Freddie inspired ballet may help to connect fans of all ages with a handful of legendary names, including Mozart and Versace. Video quality is a little iffy at times, but audio is fine. Recommended.