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| Jean-Paul
Belmondo, Jean Seberg |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
|
DTS |
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 |
Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo):
You Americans are dumb. You admire Lafayette and Maurice Chevalier.
They're the dumbest of all Frenchmen.
A doomed French crook who models himself
after American movie gangsters spends two weeks hiding out with
his American girlfriend in Paris.
 More
than forty years after its highly influential release, this defining
moment in the French Nouvelle Vague film movement remains a delightfully
fresh experience. Its style and attitude has by now been imitated
countless times, but the conviction of the highly natural performances
by the two leads and the stylistic freedom on display here still
have few equals in film history. Belmondo and Seberg make on of
movie history's great screen couples, sharing a natural rapport
and likability that goes beyond anything ever concocted in Hollywood's
artificial world of romantic comedies. The fly-on-the-wall bedroom
scenes have an intimacy and credibility rarely seen outside the
very best documentary filmmaking. Films that followed within the
French New Wave of filmmaking (especially those by Godard) may have
been typified by a pretentious attitude and an arty style that made
them ultimately rather inaccessible and by now badly dated. But
A Bout De Souffle carries none of these hallmarks, and remains
a true classic of modern cinema that deserves to be seen again and
again. |
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A Region 1 release carries an
audio commentary from film critic David Serritt, but no other
extras.
The Dutch/German/Belgian Region 2 release carries the trailer,
a still gallery and little else. The Dutch Region 2 release
served as a basis for this review.
The movie is framed at its
original Academy aspect ratio of approx. 1.33:1. Shot on cheap
black-and-white 35mm film stock using mostly natural lighting
and actual locations, A Bout de Souffle looks about
as good as one might expect it to. The print is mostly free
of blemishes, though it does exhibit quite a bit of fine grain.
Black levels are decent and no major compression artifacts
show up.
The monaural sound mix is presented in two-track Dolby Digital.
The track has a limited dynamic range but dialogues are clearly
intelligible and there is little distracting hiss.
An influential masterpiece
like this truly deserves a no-holds-barred special edition,
with a documentary, audio commentary track and anything else
that can serve to illustrate how farreaching the effects were
this film had on cinema history. Sadly, this release features
only a still gallery with several international poster
art designs and a handful of stills, and the theatrical
trailer. Menus
are static and nicely designed, using freeze-frames from the
movie.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed: February
22, 2002
Click
here for IMDB info on A
Bout de Souffle.
Click here
to return to the front page.
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