StudioCanal released Michel Polac's La Chute d'un corps (Fall of a Body) (1973) on 26 January 2022. English subtitles are provided for the main feature.
This is a mysterious little film. I don't really know anything about it or the director, so I picked it up from Amazon.fr, since their listing said it has English subtitles. It arrived today and I was pleasantly surprised to find it does indeed have both French SDH and English subtitles for the main feature. This isn't one of Canal's multi-territory releases, either. There is no country selection screen and none of the extras are subtitled in any language. This might indicate that the film will be getting a licensed release from a boutique label, or this French disc could be it.
As for the film itself, I think it is fascinating, though I found that for me, it dragged somewhat in the middle. Fernando Rey plays a mysterious man who gets downstairs neighbor Marthe Keller entangled in a mystery, when a girl falls off his balcony and onto hers, but she is urged not to contact the police. In trying to figure out what happened and why, Keller soon discovers that Rey is the leader of a cult-like "spiritual" group. I suspect that films about seductive cults are probably more attractive in France than they are in the United States, In America, there have been so many incidents with real life con men or cult leaders and their groups that a fiction film would have to work very diligently to make such a seduction believable. There isn't a lot of that here, so Keller's character comes off as either incredibly fragile, incredibly naive or both. Still, the film has a certain charm and Keller's performance is very good.
In terms of the presentation, it is very nice. I noticed some errant hairs on the bottom of the frame very early in the film, but after that, the image was very nice for what it was. The grain is quite thick throughout, to the point that I'm not sure this was shot on 35mm, though UniFrance claims it was. The sound also seems to have inherited limitations, since sometimes, dialogue can be quite low in volume, but thankfully, the subtitles are there to help anyway. From the little criticism of the film I could find and translate, it seems that this film, like most or all of Polac's films, has been forgotten and was only recently re-discovered.
I really which there was a bilingual booklet or that some of the extras had been subtitled, because I would really like to learn more about the film and the production. Still, it is the feature that counts the most, so many thanks to Canal for having this film subtitled in English.
McCrutchy, would be interesting to know if Studiocanal have the rights to this in the UK (I remember you posting in the UK & Ireland sub-forum last year about The Flesh of the Orchid (I was hoping that would get a UK Blu-ray release).
McCrutchy, would be interesting to know if Studiocanal have the rights to this in the UK (I remember you posting in the UK & Ireland sub-forum last year about The Flesh of the Orchid (I was hoping that would get a UK Blu-ray release).
I'm not certain, but the production company, Albina Productions, has only 25 films on IMDb and at least one other, Police Python 357, got a Japanese Blu-ray from Anec via StudioCanal in 2019:
So, it's tempting to speculate that Canal acquired worldwide rights to the entire catalogue of titles, but I don't know that for sure.
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La Chute d'un corps (Fall of a Body) (1973)
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