7.5 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Franck Poupart is a slightly neurotic door-to-door salesman in a sinister part of Paris' suburbs...
Starring: Patrick Dewaere, Myriam Boyer, Marie Trintignant, Bernard Blier, Jeanne HervialeForeign | 100% |
Drama | 71% |
Crime | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.67:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.66:1
French: LPCM 2.0 Mono
English
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
The descriptor film noir is tossed about with pretty flagrant abandon a lot of the time, and that loosey-goosey atmosphere can tend to also inform discussions about how the term even came to be. French critic Nico Frank is regularly cited as having “invented” it, this despite the fact that at least one other writer on film used it in the same year of 1946 that Frank is credited with debuting the phrase, while there’s at least some cogent research suggesting that film noir had shown up as early as the late thirties in other French writing. That may put the lie to another theory that Frank’s “creation” of the term film noir was influenced by Série noire, a French publishing imprint which specialized in American crime fiction and which started supplying French bookshelves with product beginning in 1945. That publishing concern gave birth to a French anthology series in the 1980s, but a few years before the tv offering debuted, a French film based on a novel by American pulp writer Jim Thompson (The Grifters and The Getaway are culled from Thompson works) co-opted the title, even though Thompson’s original novel was entitled A Hell of a Woman. (One of the supplements on this release states that Thompson's novel was published by Série noire in France, though under the completely peculiar title of Des cliques et des cloaques.)
Série noire is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Film Movement Classics, an imprint of Film Movement, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.67:1. As often tends to be the case with Film Movement releases, the insert booklet offers only a generic "new 2K restoration" without providing any further information. A couple of other online sources, including our initial news post announcing this release, state this was a 4K restoration, but I personally have not been able to find any definitive information about either resolution and even StudioCanal's own site wasn't of much help. One way or the other, this is a largely very pleasing looking presentation, one with substantial amounts of fine detail in close-ups, and a generally excellent accounting of a somewhat downtrodden palette. My one slight qualm here is a kind of slightly blue undertone that attends a lot of scenes, notably some of the outdoor material, but that said, the film does tend to offer a glut of kind of gray, wintry environments, which may tend to emphasize those tones to begin with. There are a couple of pretty gritty looking dark scenes where grain spikes appreciably (notably one very dark scene in a car at just slightly past the one hour mark), and a somewhat lesser but still mottled, crosshatched look can even show up in some relatively brighter scenes (see screenshot 19), but for the most part grain resolves very naturally.
Série noire sports an LPCM 2.0 mono track in the original French (with optional English subtitles) that supports this dialogue (and monologue) heavy film perfectly well. There are a number of archival source cues, including "Moonlight Fiesta" by Duke Ellington, which is the same name shown as a subtitle on a copy of the screenplay seen in the Making of featurette mentioned below in the Supplements section. Some of those recordings of course are on the boxy, shallow sounding side, but the newly recorded elements all sound fine.
Série noire is appropriately dark, given that adjectival color in its very title, but it's also almost weirdly spry in some of its comical aspects. The film boasts excellent performances, a brisk pace, and some wonderfully outré situations that keep it pretty wildly unpredictable at times. Technical merits are solid, the supplementary package appealing, and Série noire comes Highly recommended.
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