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Europa Europa



As World War II splits Europe, sixteen-year-old German Jew Salomon (Marco Hofschneider) is separated from his family after fleeing with them to Poland, and finds himself reluctantly assuming various ideological identities in order to hide the deadly secret of his Jewishness. He is bounced from a Soviet orphanage, where he plays a dutiful Stalinist, to the Russian front, where he hides in plain sight as an interpreter for the German army, and back to his home country, where he takes on his most dangerous role: a member of the Hitler Youth. Based on the real-life experiences of Salomon Perel, Agnieszka Holland's wartime tour de force Europa Europa is a breathless survival story told with the verve of a comic adventure, an ironic refutation of the Nazi idea of racial purity, and a complex portrait of a young man caught up in shifting historical calamities and struggling to stay alive.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Agnieszka Holland, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary from 2008 featuring Holland
• New interviews with Holland and actor Marco Hofschneider
• New video essay by film scholar Annette Insdorf
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by critic Amy Taubin

Should be some upgrade over the Arrow DVD.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Agnieszka Holland, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Audio commentary from 2008 featuring Holland
New interviews with Holland and actor Marco Hofschneider
New video essay by film scholar Annette Insdorf
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by critic Amy Taubin

The audio commentary seems to be from Arrow's DVD (UK exclusive) release.

It is quite amusing that both this and 1984 are released in the same month as they are both about superficial conformity whilst concealing fundamental aspects of yourself just to survive, and the toll that constant concealment takes on the individual. The whole film is about the notion of being forcibly inducted into becoming a part of something without any conscious choice on your part (whether Judaism or Nazism: the bris done before any chance to consent and no particular choice about having the uniquely 'Aryan look' either), with the queasy thrill of feeling a sense of group identity and being able to manufacture yourself over and over to better match the needs of the society around you at a particular moment in time that is constantly being given an heightened frisson by the threat of the alternate identity (the past) being uncovered.

It is a film dealing with some really complicated ideas of purely doing whatever necessary to ensure survival against being aware of all of the different facets that make you 'you' (internal and external; upbringing and environment; the wider societal ideology being confirmed or negated through individual encounters; the difference between relationships and allegiances) and weighing up how much you are prepared to give up before you become someone else entirely. How complicit can you be? Is compromising half way opening up to new experiences that mean you experience life in that state more intensely than even the most committed members of either hegemony? But also run the risk of corruption and actual full assimilation if the 'façade' you create becomes too seductive? Or do you have to remain rigid and unwavering in your internal belief system whatever the ideology, wherever your life leads you, because a world without clear heroes and villains (aggressors and victims) runs the risk of everything becoming morally grey?

It is also why despite the triumphant voice over ending I get a real sense of ambivalence from the idea of going to the promised land and making sure that every generation proudly bear their own marks to ensure a sense of continuity of group identity. Is that as reductive as the situation going on in the rest of the film, in some ways?

Chris, which lab is credited for the restoration ? Looks like an Eclair restoration (or, a bit less likely, Ritrovata).

It's Eclair

Can the colors really be faulted if the restoration was supervised by the director?

Yes, we call it the Friedkin Rule

100 Comedy Points.

TwoTecs wrote: Fri Jun 28, 2019 6:15 pm Can the colors really be faulted if the restoration was supervised by the director?

Yes because Eclair and Ritrovata have a record of applying LUTs that affect the colour grading.

cdnchris wrote:It's Eclair

Well, that was easy. The blues... they're always the same no matter the movie with them.

tenia wrote: Sat Jun 29, 2019 6:34 am

cdnchris wrote:It's Eclair

Well, that was easy. The blues... they're always the same no matter the movie with them.

Eclair's theme song. Played on a continues loop at their studios

it's difficult to judge the quality of restoration/caps on my computer screen. It doesn't look like Le Concorda to me; it could have been worse. So I read your text/review about the pictures. Thanks a lot for the review, Chris. Are the dark scene with black really black or plagued by the greenish-pale-black like on a lot of Eclair restoration ?
I was expecting DVDBeaver (with a tons of vidcaps of Julie Delpy (of course, the best one for the premium account) or bluray.com to be the first to review it.

I have rewatched this movie recently I was somehow disappointed to say the least.
I had some good memories about this movie when I saw it in theatres; perhaps because I was younger, I don't know...
But the Julie Delpy effect was still there (like the "impulse effect" (aka quand un inconnu vous offres des fleurs) (Julie is perfect in the fraülein young blonde role and hair with bunches (or is it big tail ?) like Nellie Oleson in the Little House in the Prairie) sorry. Well, I can of regret that they didn't put the French dub as an extra audio track because it features Julie Delpy's voice (she was dubbed by another actress in German)

Rupert Pupkin wrote:Are the dark scene with black really black or plagued by the greenish-pale-black like on a lot of Eclair restoration ?

It's that mushy greenish/grey black. It never looks anywhere near black.

oh shi ](*,) - thanks for the confirmation Chris. Bad news. That's what I understood from your text review. Now, when I look at the vidcaps the "fake-greenish-black" looks obvious on your capture.
Too bad.

Discuss.....beaver