Montparnasse 19

[Ribs]

Montparnasse 19, a film about the tragic final years in the life of Italian painter and sculptor Amadeo Modigliani, was itself beset by tragedy. Max Ophuls, the famed director of Letter from an Unknown Woman and Le Plaisir, died during its production, leaving his friend Jacques Becker to complete the picture. Its lead performer too, the great French actor Gérard Philippe, would succumb to cancer just over a year after its release.
In tracing the latter part of Modigliani’s life, Montparnasse 19, focuses on the key figures during his time in Paris – his patron Léopold Zborowski (played by Gérard Séty) and two muses, Beatrice Hastings (Lilli Palmer) and Jeanne Hébuterne (Anouk Aimée) – and his gradual descent into alcoholism and drug addiction. The end results, both hauntingly beautiful and savagely ironic, are really quite remarkable. A fitting tribute to the outstanding careers of Ophuls and Philippe, and another excellent entry in the equally superb filmography of Becker, a filmmaker who is finally getting his due.
SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS
• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation of the feature, from materials supplied by Gaumont
• Original 1.0 mono sound
• Optional English subtitles
• Jacques Becker and the Artistic Condition, a 55-minute documentary on the making of Montparnasse 19 featuring interviews with Anouk Aimée, Françoise Fabian and Jean Becker
• Newly filmed appreciation of the film by Ginette Vincendeau, author of The BFI Companion to French Cinema and Paris in the Cinema: Beyond the Flâneur
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matthew Griffin
FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Collector’s booklet containing new writing by David Jenkins



November 27

[domino harvey]

I actually watched this a couple of weeks ago for the first time. I know this unconvincing hagiography of artistic temperament found willing favor from the Cahiers crew for its auteurist bolsterings within the narrative, but it doesn't work for me. The protagonist’s central conflict is never convincing and the romance with Anouk Aimée is alternately melodramatic and nonsensical— and here I thought her pliancy in Le farceur was as ludicrous as her on-screen motivations got! The film does do its best to course correct with a bitter and cynical ending as Lino Ventura comes into the scene as an opportunistic agent who takes advantage of a bad situation with zero remorse. But it’s an ending that deserves a better film to cap.

[domino harvey]

The end results, both hauntingly beautiful and savagely ironic, are really quite remarkable.

Are we sure this isn't a MoC release?

[kompromiss]

Great that I've never got round to buying the french blu-ray of it. Saw the film on TV about ten years ago. Will definitely get the Arrow disk.

[nitin]

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film6/blu-ray_ ... lu-ray.htm

Beaver's caps show that perhaps Arrow did get access to an unfiltered master from Gaumont as the caps at br.com for the french edition seem much worse.

[tenia]

There are multiple issues with the Gaumont disc : it's degrained, has poor black levels, and the encode shows chroma and compression issues.
Now, the encode is better, the chroma issues are gone and the grain is back, leaving just the black levels issue.

[zedz]

I'm pretty much on the same page as domino with this film. It's a fine, if for the most part by-the-numbers, biopic of Modigliani bequeathed to Jacques Becker by Max Ophuls. The milieu is nicely evoked, Gerard Philippe does a movie-star version of drunken indigence (serviceable, but no more), and things trundle towards the inevitable tragic conclusion. But then Becker pulls off an audaciously dark ending that’s so powerful it makes the whole film seem better than it really is, in retrospect. It’s not surprising to discover that this coda (and the character around whom it revolves, who’s a better actor than anybody else in the film) were entirely Becker’s invention, since it’s so outside the well-travelled range of the rest of the film.