6.8 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Agnès Varda interviews two subjects from a photograph she took 30 years earlier.
Director: Agnès VardaForeign | 100% |
Documentary | 26% |
Short | 18% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.66:1
French: Dolby Digital Mono
English
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Note: This film is available as part of
The Complete Films of Agnès Varda.
In the wake (figurative or otherwise) of Agnès Varda’s death last year at the age of 90, quite a bit has rightfully been written about this iconic force
in
both
French and global cinema. Varda’s output includes well over fifty credits as a director (including some television entries as detailed by the
IMDb), and aside from listing some of her better known triumphs,
many obituaries and/or eulogies about Varda mentioned any number of other biographical data points, including her rather unique position as a
woman in France’s nouvelle vague movement, her own feminism which was featured none too subtly in some of her films, and her
frequently provocative experimental style. But you know what one of the things that kind of fascinates me personally most about Varda? That she
was married for 28 years to Jacques Demy, from 1962 until Demy’s death in 1990. That Varda, often a purveyor of verité infused
“realism”,
whether that be in outright documentaries or at least ostensibly more “fictional” outings, and Demy, a director whose candy colored, dreamlike and
at least relatively "Hollywoodized" musicals with
Michel Legrand brought a new luster and gloss to French cinema, managed to make a marital go of it for so long is certainly testament to the
maxim
that “opposites attract”, even if those oppositional forces in this instance played out at least in part in terms of what kinds of films the two were
often
best remembered for. If Varda's long marriage to Demy is more than enough reason to celebrate her personal life, her professional life is
beautifully
feted in this rather astounding new set from Criterion, which aggregates an amazing 39 films (albeit some running as short as a few minutes) to
provide what is arguably one of the most insightful
overviews of Varda's cinematic oeuvre. Perhaps unavoidably, but also undeniably movingly, these personal and professional sides of
Varda
merge in at least some of the films in this set, including
The
Young
Girls Turn 25, The World of Jacques
Demy, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Beaches of Agnès.
Ulysse is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of The Criterion Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.66:1. Some prefatory text discloses that this was filmed on 35mm argentic color stock in a 1.66:1 panoramic format, and restored by Ciné Tamaris in 2015 at Laboratory Eclair, with a 2K digital restoration from a 2K scan of the original 35mm negative. Color grading was supervised by Agnès Varda. While the focal photograph and quite a few other stills that Varda features here are in black and white, the main interview segments are in color, and the palette looks natural throughout these interstitial sequences. There are bright pops throughout the color moments, with blues once again often being prevalent, but with reds, as in some of the outfits some kids wear late in the film, looking nicely vivid and accurate. There is some archival black and white film utilized that is in considerably more ragged shape than the bulk of the presentation.
Many of the shorts in this collection have unfortunately only been granted lossy audio, and Ulysse features a lossy Dolby Digital Mono mix in the original French. That said, this is another Varda piece that frankly doesn't have an overly ambitious sound design, with narration and first person interview segments holding sway almost all of the time, with a few moments of music as in the opening credits sequence. Everything is rendered well enough within the context of lossy audio. As with many of the other films in this set, prefatory text states that E.L. Diapason restored the audio from the original 35mm magnetic mix.
My hometown of Portland, Oregon has increasingly become a haven for expat notables escaping from the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles, and in that regard I was kind of gobsmacked to find myself standing behind a legendary jazz pianist I had idolized growing up in a line in a local post office one day. I summoned my courage and engaged the guy in a conversation (luckily we quickly discovered we had friends in common), and I was struck in just our brief conversation where I, as a "superfan", seemed to have a better memory of, for example, what he played on certain sessions than he did. There's something at least a little similar going on Ulysse, where the two focal humans in Varda's famous photograph have little to no memory of what took place that day. That may put the kibosh on finding any "meaning" to the event, but this is another really interesting if lesser documentary by Varda.
(Still not reliable for this title)
Ydessa, the Bears and etc.
2004
Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe / Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex
1975
1958
1964
1966
The So-Called Caryatids
1984
Along the Coast
1958
Visages villages
2017
L'univers de Jacques Demy
1995
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse... deux ans après
2002
Agnès Varda: From Here to There
2011
1984
2015
You've Got Beautiful Stairs, You Know
1986
1976
Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans
1993
2003
Oncle Yanco
1967
1968
Varda par Agnès
2019