French Twist (Gazon Maudit) (Shock) (1995)

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1995
Running Time	100:42
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Josiane Balasko
Studio Distributor	Shock Entertainment	Starring	Victoria Abril Josiane Balasko Alain Chabat Ticky Holgado
Case	PUSH-34
RPI	$31.95	Music	Manuel Malou

    The front cover of this disc makes several claims:

    "GREAT FUN! A CUNNING, ROBUST FARCE!"
    "Brisk and sassy. A mature sex comedy"
    a scorned wife. an outrageous affair. the perfect revenge.

    All of this is marketing spin. The back-cover blurb contains some telling inaccuracies, too.

    The film is not a farce, although some of it is (over)acted at a highly melodramatic pitch that would suit a farce. It is really an interesting tale of what happens to a housewife when her fairly mundane existence is jolted by a chain of events that all begins with an accident.

    The housewife is Loli (Victoria Abril). She thinks she's fairly happily married. She has two young boys. She caught her husband in bed with another woman once, but he promised to be good after that. She believes him.

    The husband is Laurent (Alain Chabat). The film wastes no time at all painting him as a jerk who thinks with his genitalia, allowing them to lead him from one woman to the next. He is a real estate agent, and has no compunction about sleeping with his female clients, as well as every other woman he can. He basically sleeps with anything in a skirt.

    The accident comes when one of Loli's boys drops a toy down the sink and blocks the drain, and a van breaks down outside their house. The driver knocks at the door, asking for water for the radiator of the van. The driver is Marie-Jo (or Marijo, according to IMDb) (Josiane Balasko). She helps with the sink, being a lot more handy than Loli. They strike up a conversation, and even smoke some small cigars, before Laurent gets home. Laurent reacts very badly to Marie-Jo's presence, perhaps because he feels threatened by a gay woman, or because he can sense some attraction between the two women. He objects to her being invited to dinner, but Loli insists on showing her gratitude for fixing the sink. He gets a call from a "client" (a fairly regular occurrence, we gather), and heads out. Loli and Marie-Jo share a pleasant evening, eating, talking, drinking wine, nothing more.

    It's ironic — it is Laurent's behaviour that drives Loli into a relationship with Marie-Jo. But then he is nice to Loli, and she sleeps with him again, which puts Marie-Jo's nose out of joint. Loli rather enjoys this, having two people interested in her — it is quite clear now that she was feeling rather neglected (and rightfully so). Bear in mind that Loli is from Barcelona, and is supposed to have a fiery Spanish temperament...

    The sequence of events is fairly complicated, and involve Loli discovering Laurent's massive infidelity, and Loli being confronted with the idea of Marie-Jo having other friends (other gay friends).

    There is humour, of a fairly dark kind, in this film, but there is real drama, too. It is easy to get swept up in it, and you find yourself wondering how it will all get resolved. Will Loli end up with Marie-Jo? With Laurent? With both? Or even neither? It's interesting to discover that you care. The resolution is somewhat unexpected, and I'm still pondering the meaning of the final scene.

    The cover will give you the impression that there is nudity in this film — that's true; we see Loli naked on a number of occasions, but we get to see Laurent naked almost as often. Yet the MA rating only mentions adult themes, low-level coarse language, and drug use (the latter is quite mild).

    In all, this film is worth seeing. Unfortunately, it has been accorded little respect in being transferred to DVD.

Video

    This transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, not 16x9 enhanced. The opening and closing credits are shown in a wider aspect ratio, not 16x9 enhanced, which strongly suggests that this is a pan&scan effort, rather than open-matte. The original aspect ratio, as far as I can discover, was 1.66:1 (not an uncommon aspect ratio for a French film). I suspect that this DVD has been produced from a master made for VHS — the single soundtrack and burned-in subtitles, together with the aspect ratio, give credence to this suspicion.

    The image is a little soft in close-ups — see 41:16 for an example of the best the image gets — but it is quite soft in long shots. Shadow detail is not wonderful, but I have seen worse. Film grain doesn't seem to be a problem — what looks like grain is probably just the limited resolution of the recording. Low-level noise seems to be minimal (except at the end of the Siren logo — how long are they going to use that poor quality rendering?).

    Colour is not bad at all — there are no fully-saturated colours, but the colours don't look especially washed out. There are no colour-related artefacts.

    There are some film artefacts, but they are generally fairly small, and not troubling — a few scratches, plenty of flecks and spots.

    There is some aliasing, but it is reasonably mild. There's a bit of moire of some of the patterned fabrics. There's quite a bit of shimmer combined with mosquito noise on some of the backgrounds, to the point where it gets somewhat distracting.

    The only subtitles are in English, burned into the image — they are not a subtitle stream, so they cannot be turned off, even if you understand French. I recall very little French, but I know enough to know that these subtitles are not completely accurate (even if they are not a literal translation, they are inaccurate in spots). They do seem fairly well-timed, and they are very easy to read, being in a fairly large font (not an uncommon thing for VHS subtitles — they are larger to compensate for the lesser resolution). These subtitles are credited to SBS Australia, by the way.

    The disc is single-sided, single-layered. Given that the only thing on the disc is the film, the single layer is placed under no stress.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The soundtrack is coded as Others, which is a bit lazy — it is French, pure and simple. There are perhaps a dozen words of English in the entire soundtrack. It's Dolby Digital 2.0, not surround-encoded, at 192 kbps. I didn't notice anything much in the way of stereo spread — it sounds pretty much mono.

    The dialogue is clear enough, and there are no obvious audio sync issues.

    The score, from Manuel Malou, includes some fairly obvious Spanish cues for Victoria Abril. There are some popular songs (including an interesting cover of A Whiter Shade of Pale) in the soundtrack.

    This straight 2.0 soundtrack makes no use of the surrounds or subwoofer, and the sound doesn't extend far enough into the bass register for bass management to direct it into the sub.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    There are no extras at all

Menu

    The menu is static and silent, offering only Play Movie and Scene Selection.

    The R1 version of this disc isn't released until August 2003, so there are no reliable details about its contents available yet, but indications are that it, too, will be pan&scan. There are versions available in Region 2, but they are pan&scan, and they don't sound to be any better quality than this one. It is rather disappointing to report that the only way I've found to obtain this film in widescreen is on VHS tape (there is a widescreen tape available, albeit not 16x9 enhanced, of course).

    An interesting and somewhat entertaining movie, given a poor quality transfer to DVD.

    The video quality is mediocre, and pan&scan.

    The audio is perfectly adequate for this dialogue-oriented movie.

    The extras are utterly absent.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall