The Benoit Jacquot Collection Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

The Benoit Jacquot Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 28, 2015

La Nouvelle Vague, the French New Wave, is a perhaps singular movement in the history of film, even if many of its supposed proponents would argue about whether there was an “official” movement at all. It’s hard to think of another example of a group of filmmakers crafting a series of films that revolutionized both content and (probably especially) form so viscerally as did iconoclasts like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard (and what’s really frightening is that these two titans, along with others in the New Wave whatever it was, were critics to begin with—yikes!) Maybe the Abstract Expressionists, or even the Americans who would later be identified (ironically by the French) as film noir adherents, could be afforded this same radical status, but the New Wave was so revolutionary and trendsetting that it seems to stand alone, a monolithic presence not just in its native country, but in the entire annals of cinema. That said, the fact that the New Wave looms so large in France’s history may have led to certain categorization issues for some French filmmakers who followed in the wake of the Wave, including Benoît Jacquot, a man whose birthyear of 1947 was only one year before "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo", one of the first critical analyses that gave birth to the New Wave, was published. That ostensibly should place Jacquot at least partially in a post-New Wave generation, since many of the movement’s most iconic films came out in either the late fifties or early sixties (e.g., Paris Belongs to Us, The 400 Blows, Breathless , Shoot the Piano Player), while Jacquot himself didn’t really get started helming feature films until the seventies. However, Jacquot’s early career included an extended apprenticeship under one of the more lustrous (if sadly lesser known) names from the New Wave, Marguerite Duras, a director in her own right who is nonetheless probably best remembered for having written Resnais’ classic Hiroshima mon amour. Perhaps due to that connection, as well as to some almost ineffable elements that waft through Jacquot’s films at times, some folks have tried pigeonholing him as a New Wave phenomenon, but Jacquot, while anarchic in his own deliberate way, is more of a formalist than some might typically associate with New Wave sensibilities, and he has in fact even mounted the same kind of historical epic (Farewell, My Queen) that was a particular thorn in the sides of some of the postulants populating the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma back in the day. (It should be noted that Jacquot’s “take” on the historical epic is typically insouciant at times, perhaps indicative of the fact that he probably read some of the barbs aimed at this genre by some of the 1950s French critics.) Jacquot has been curiously underserved on Blu-ray, with only 3 Hearts appearing in addition to the aforementioned Marie Antoinette drama domestically on disc, but Cohen Film Collection is ameliorating that issue with a new release that collects three of Jacquot’s 1990s efforts together.

For reviews of each of the three films included in this collection, please click on the following links:

The Disenchanted Blu-ray review

A Single Girl Blu-ray review

Keep It Quiet Blu-ray review

The Benoit Jacquot Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Video quality of each release is assessed in the above referenced reviews.

Note: Screenshots 1-3 are from The Disenchanted, screenshots 4-6 are from A Single Girl and screenshots 7-9 are from Keep It Quiet.

The Benoit Jacquot Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Audio quality of each release is assessed in the above referenced reviews.

The Benoit Jacquot Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Supplements for each release are assessed in the above referenced reviews.

The Benoit Jacquot Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Jacquot is a bit of an acquired taste, and those without a Continental sensibility may find these films a bit too detached and too slow, while those with a Continental sensibility may find them inching more toward "4" or even "4.5" score territory. All three of the films in this new set have their own distinctive pleasures, and all three are chock full of great performances. Recommended.