This year's movie turkey for Turkey Day--the new Blu-ray of Merchant-Ivory's QUARTET

Hey, everyone's entitled to make a mistake, right? Even a producing/directing duo the likes of the award-winning combo, James Ivory and Ismail Merchant. Still, it takes something extra to prepare yourself for the increasingly tiresome, obvious and finally near-pointless depravations of the duo's 1981 endeavor, QUARTET.

That this movie stars Maggie Smith, Alan Bates, Isabelle Adjani, and Anthony Higgins, with a bunch more good people -- Suzanne Flon, Pierre Clémenti and Armelia McQueen -- in supporting roles, makes the whole affair even odder and sadder.

At the time of Quartet's initial theatrical release, certain critics commented on the oddity of finding filmmakers like Merchant/Ivory engaged with a set of characters who were mostly -- even though a few of these were wealthy -- among the low-end and very louche set. True enough, but a major change of venue can often prove as salutary for artists as for their audience. Not here. The creative team seems to sit just outside all the seaminess, observant and uncomfortable. All too soon, and continuing throughout, so are we.

The may well be due to the source material itself: Postures, the 1928 novel by famous British author Jean Rhys (shown above), published in the USA under the title of Quartet. Ms Rhys was a fine but dark writer, whose work may best be appreciated on the page. If its translations to screen so far are any indication, the results are only middling (Wide Sargasso Sea) to poor (the film at hand).

In this tale, a pretty young woman (Ms Adjani, above) falls in love with a rotter (Mr. Higgins, below) who is soon imprisoned. She is then taken in by a wealthy couple (Ms Smith, shown at bottom, and Mr. Bates, at left, two photos below) who use her, abuse her and toss her away. We see all this happening, all too slowly -- since we're quite aware of what's going on, and so, for that matter is our young heroine -- until the film's 101 minutes seem like an eternity.

Performances are as good as possible under the circumstances of a screenplay (by the usually on-the-mark Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, with some uncredited help from Mr. Ivory) that at best seems thoroughly mediocre and at worst borders on the obvious-tending-toward-ridiculous. You sit there waiting for something truly specific to emanate from the mouths of these characters, but all you hear is standard, paint-by-numbers stuff.

The background is sometimes interesting and fun, never more so than in a night club where Ms McQueen gets to perform a naughty number, but the foreground is consistently glum and glummer. As I say, everyone's entitled to a misfire, and Quartet is surely that film.

From Cohen Media Group's Merchant Ivory Collection, the movie made its Blu-ray and DVD debut earlier this fall and is available now -- for purchase and/or rental. A number of Bonus Features -- various interviews with Mr. Ivory -- are included on the disc, and the Blu-ray transfer itself is a decent one, if nothing special.

SHAKESPEARE WALLAH: early Merchant-Ivory collaboration gets 2K Blu-ray/DVD restoration

Made in 1965 and released in U.S. theaters the following year, SHAKESPEARE WALLAH, though not the first collaboration between producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, was the film that put the two on critics' and the art film circuit map. TrustMovies was too young and untutored to nearly appreciate the movie back then (he found it dull and weird), and he knew little about Britain's long-term "adventure" in India.

Seen now, more than a half-century later, the movie shimmers and glows with typical Merchant-Ivory (the pair is shown above in a 1983 photo by Lord Snowden) subdued wit and a crisp and glorious transfer of its black-and-white cinematography in this new restoration via the increasingly important Cohen Film Collection.

The film follows an itinerant group composed of a British family (father/mother/daughter) and their native helpers (you'd have to call them lackeys, as they barely get paid for their work), as it travels about the provinces of India putting on scenes from (or entire but heavily cut-down) plays by Shakespeare. If the actors are not great, neither are they bad. They do their art as best they can under increasingly difficult circumstances.

Ditto the actors who play these actors -- Geoffrey Kendal (dad, above, center left), Laura Liddell (mom, above, center) and Felicity Kendal (daughter, above, center right) -- a real family, the parents of which actually toured India for decades doing exactly this, while their daughter, Felicity, who was born in India, went on to make quite an important career for herself in British film and television.

When their barely-making-it automobile breaks down between stops, they are helped and befriended by a local man (a young and so sexy Shashi Kapoor, above) who immediately sets his sites on the daughter.

Trouble is, this fellow is also the boyfriend of a top Bollywood star of the day, played to perfection by Madhur Jaffrey (above, right). Complications ensue, and sure enough, they're handled with the usual flair for irony, subtle wit and entertainment provided by the Merchant/Ivory combo and their oft-times writing collaborator, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Along the way, we're treated to scenes that show how change is always with us, then as now -- and, as usual, just as difficult to accept. While politics don't seem to matter much here, economics certainly do, as do the usual themes of class and race where India and Britain are concerned.

Overall  though, this remains a mostly light-hearted, romantic entertainment touched with a melancholy that grows ever more pronounced as the film moves along. In the years since Shakespeare Wallah arrived, Mr. Ivory has proven enormously assured in his skills (he won an Oscar this past year for his adapted screenplay to Call Me By Your Name). Of the filmmakers and major actors on view only Ivory, Ms Jaffrey and Ms Kendall are still with us. Thankfully, their movie is, too.

From the Cohen Film Collection and running two hours and two minutes, this newly restored treat arrived on DVD and Blu-ray this past April -- for purchase and/or rental.

UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN: Volume 2 of The Films of Maurice Pialat hits Blu-ray/DVD

Maurice Pialat made UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN (Sous le soleil de Satan) toward the end of his 44-year career, and the film exhibits nearly everything that fans love and detractors call out about this divisive French filmmaker. The film proves episodic and rather clunky (smoothness of any kind appears not to have been among Pialat's filmmaking characteristics), yet it deals with subjects so interesting and appealing/appalling -- god, the devil, faith, religion and miracles -- that it is difficult not to become, well, pretty quickly hooked.

Further, Pialat's knack for casting ensures that the leading roles will be played by actors who are not simply believable and talented but who possess a certain charisma that keeps one glued. Here, these includes the likes of Gérard Depardieu, Sandrine Bonnaire, and the director himself (shown at left) who plays one of the three leads with impressive seriousness and strength. The film is based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, which was adapted by for the screen by Pialat and Sylvie Pialat, his wife. Not having read the novel I have little idea how true the Pialats were to the original, but what has come out is a film about a very odd priest named Donissan (Depardieu, shown on poster, top, and below ), his vocation and career as, it turns out, some kind of miracle worker.

Initially, it seems that our priest is simply unsure of himself and maybe in over his head. But as the film progresses -- clunkily, it must be said -- pretty soon he's raising the dead. We also meet Ms Bonnaire, below, playing a young woman who clearly gets around some, having had affairs with two of her town's prominent males -- one a nobleman going bankrupt who would like her to live with him in something close to poverty, the other a married man who doubles as town bigwig.

Before you can say murder-or-maybe-accident-and-then-a-suicide, one of these guys is dead, and soon the responsible person is, too. And then the miracles -- or whatever -- begin.  The film if full of talk, much of it involving religion and faith, god and the devil. We even get a scene with Satan himself -- or maybe it's just Donissan's imagining of him -- who turns out to be gay (appropriate for a priest's fantasy, no?).

Bonnaire is, as always, riveting, while Depardieu has rarely looked sexier than here, in a cassock. And Pialat, as Donissan's mentor and friend, brings enormous caring and concern to the film, which certainly helps us some ways toward feeling that all this is somehow important.

The religious talk/philosophy is interesting but not terribly memorable. And the reactions of Donissan's parishioners to him and his healing powers seem pretty typical of any congregation exposed to "the Lazarus effect."

But is all this simply magical stuff in the guise of religion? Or maybe the reverse. Well, hey -- god works in mysterious ways, right? Because of the film's abrupt and episodic structure, we must piece together certain events and ideas, which is tolerable, I suppose. For some, this sort of filmmaking will seem "rigorous". Others will find it merely clumsy.

TrustMovies joins the latter camp, but due to the strength of the three lead performances (the rest of the cast comes off well, too), he did not find it difficult to stick with and enjoy the film on one level, at least.

From the Cohen Film Collection, Under the Sun of Satan -- running just 98 minutes and carrying the series title of The Film of Maurice Pialat, Volume 2 -- offers a Blu-ray featuring a very good transfer as a two-disc set, the first featuring the film itself, with the second disc containing a wealth of interviews. Both Blu-ray and DVD are available this coming Tuesday, June 14 -- for purchase or rental.

Blu-ray/DVDebut: Cohen Film Collection releases The Films of Maurice Pialat: Volume 1

The late French filmmaker Maurice Pialat is probably best known to American arthouse audiences as the man who gave us À nos amours, the film that introduced Sandrine Bonnaire to the U.S. and the world (though I remember seeing his earlier Naked Childhood at one of the early New York Film Festivals). His films resolutely resist sentimentality and instead appear to offer an unvar-nished look at their characters and through them at life itself. This is most likely why Pialat (shown below) never found a wide audience here in America.

Another reason might be that those films tend to plod a bit, particularly for folk who prefer event above character. And yet, in their quiet rather careful way, they are often full of things happening. In any case, we now have with us three of this filmmaker's relatively early work (he also made a lot of docs and shorts that may never see the light of day on these shores):

THE MOUTH AGAPE (1974, 87 minutes), which deals with the death of a late-middle-aged mother and wife, and the family that gathers around her;

GRADUATE FIRST (1978, 85 minutes), which looks in on a bevy of French high-school students, along with some of their parents and teachers, as the kids topple gracelessly into young adulthood;

and the most famous of the three, LOULOU (1980, 105 minutes), which, while offering the star power of Gérard Depardieu, Isabelle Huppert and Guy Marchand, also proves in some ways, to be the least of the three. (I remember seeing this one around the time of its original release and wondering what all the fuss was about. Seeing it again, some 35 years later, I'm wondering still.

TrustMovies did a binge watch of this new release -- available on both DVD and Blu-ray -- viewing one after another of the films. This was edifying in some ways because it definitely brought out certain characteristics of this filmmaker that I might not have noticed so thoroughly, had I put more space between the viewings. In Pialat's movies, the men are mostly pigs and the women docile tag-alongs who weep a lot and do not seem to enjoy sex all that much, though they partake in it often, due to the male prerogative.

This was/is no doubt true enough in its time and may remain so in some instances today, but given the rise in feminism over the 1960s and 70s, you might have thought this had reached France. Not so much, evidently, in Pialat's world. His movies are said to be life-affirming, but one must wonder after viewing: What kind of life do they affirm?

Still, performances are adept and real, and particularly in The Mouth Agape. The moments of life are both carefully observed and seemingly off-the-cuff (this is a hallmark of Pialat, I think).  And how good it is to see French actor Philippe Léotard (above) again, alongside a Nathalie Baye (above, top) who appears here as young as I have ever seen her. Overall, the filmmaker's choice of moments and scenes come together to produce an end-of-life tale that must have seemed new and daring in its day, and remains so even now. Only Stéphane Brizé's A Few Hours of Spring has done anything like this in terms of the death of a parent on film that I have witnessed.

Ditto the life of the kids in Graduate First, which Pialat makes seem both full of energy but not much promise. In the adults he shows us, we again see lives thwarted and cut off. School, family and work life, even married life for these kids, seems of questionable value. The centerpiece of the movie is a wedding celebration during which so much bubbles to the surface. The males, whether adult or kids, all seem horny as hell, and the French penchant for philosophy -- at least in school studies -- is viewed by the filmmaker with a gimlet eye.

As for Loulou, yes, we get the young and luscious Depardieu and Huppert, as well as a surprisingly unclothed Marchand, who proves quite the "bear." Behavior is shoddy, albeit lifelike, all round, with betrayal rampant, while growing up, at least for its title character (Depardieu's Loulou), proves a very difficult thing.

Loulou is supposed to represent, I am guessing, the life force, and while the actor is as charming as he usually was in his younger days, he is just as often a rude bore. Huppert exhibits her patented here-but-not-here quality -- is there an actress better at this? I doubt it. She raises being non-committal to an art form -- and the two performers let their odd chemistry engage quite well. But for all the sturm-und-drang on view, I much prefer the two older, less showy films to this one.

From Cohen Film Collection's Classics of French Cinema series, the three-disc package in one box features Graduate First and The Mouth Agape on one disc, Loulou on another, and all the multitudinous extras on the third.  The Films of Maurice Pialat, Volume 1 (this augurs well for more to come) arrives on DVD and Blu-ray -- with the Blu-ray transfer are pretty good for each film -- this coming Tuesday, May 17, for purchase, and I hope, rental, too. The series would seem a must for Pialat fans, and a good introduction to those who've yet to discover his work. (The mother/daughter confrontation above is from Graduate First.)