The Louis Malle Collection

This is a wonderful box of 10 essential films from Louis Malle, the outstanding French director who is oft-associated with the French New Wave and yet always stood somewhat apart from it. While academics and critics have always lauded the Cahiers du Cinéma group of critics-turned directors (Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer) and the so-called Left-Bank Group (Resnais, Demy, Varda, Marker) for their bold modernist experimentation, Malle has been somewhat unfairly overlooked despite winning several major awards including the Cannes Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Documentary (both with Jacques Cousteau for Le monde du silence) and two Venice Golden Lions (for Atlantic City and Au revoir les enfants). Watching all the films in this box made me aware that while many New Wave films now seem quite dated (especially Godard’s 60s work) Malle’s work remains fresh and vital. Rather than playing with cinematic form with all its self-reflexivity and reverence for classic Hollywood of the past (especially Hitchcock), Malle continues on the French humanist tradition as established by Renoir and Vigo and developed by Bresson. The influence of both Hitchcock and Bresson is obviously felt in his début Lift to the Scaffold, but thereafter he beat his own path making a series of films on a variety of subjects, but always on real people evincing real emotions in real life situations. Usually the initial inspiration comes either from his own autobiography or the experiences of family or close friends. There is a feeling of reflecting on life, the ambiguity of which rendering it ultimately unknowable. There are no easy answers as in film after film he approaches controversial subjects or taboos – desertion of family responsibility (Les amants), suicide (Le feu follet), incest (Le souffle au cœur), wartime Nazi collaboration (Lacombe, Lucien), the Holocaust (Au revoir les enfants), pederasty (Pretty Baby) – with an absolute refusal to judge. For Malle the feeling is very much of posing questions rather than providing answers as he knows that in life concrete answers rarely exist. His preference for shooting films about adolescents (in this box Zazie dans le métro, Le souffle au cœur, Lacombe, Lucien, Black Moon, Au revoir les enfants) puts him in Truffaut (Les Mistons, Les 400 Coups) territory, but arguably across his whole career his work was more consistently successful artistically (certainly less sentimental), and remains much more pertinent. Because he made films about the human condition (as opposed to films about films) he side-stepped the modernist revolution and was over-looked for decades. Now we look back and see that while the modernist revolution has run its course and key films like À bout de soufflé, Tirez sur le pianiste and Paris nous appartient are now more historical documents than living, breathing pieces of cinema, Malle’s films remain fundamentally alive and ripe for rediscovery.The films in this box perfectly encapsulate a career in feature filmmaking. Lift to the Scaffold is highly rated by some, but is essentially a routine mostly successful exercise in style (Malle proving to himself that he could ‘do’ both Bressonian austerity and Hitchcockian suspense), and is memorable mostly for Jeanne Moreau wandering the nocturnal streets of Paris to a haunting Miles Davis jazz score. Malle cast Moreau in his second film, Les amants which takes haute bourgeois complacency and hypocrisy as its main subject as a spoilt rich wife junks her husband and child and runs off with a young man. Thin on content, but strong on romantic atmosphere, the long languid takes contrast markedly with the anarchic style of the following Zazie dans le métro which is all fast and furious chop and change in its inimical New Wave self-reflexivity replete with a jokey playing around with various cinematic tricks (jump cuts, slow motion, fast motion, etc) in its zany comic portrayal of 48 hours in the life of a young girl wreaking havoc on Paris as her mother has a tryst with her boyfriend. It looks like a parody of the New Wave until you notice it was made in 1960 at a time when most of the New Wave films it ‘parodies’ had yet to be made! Le feu follet is Malle’s first masterpiece, the film he has said where he found himself. It’s a hugely impressive meditation on the last 48 hours of an alcoholic who bids his friends adieu before bowing out. I watched this years ago thinking it was rather gray and depressing, but I see now Malle’s enormous compassion for his subject which turns it into a stunningly profound meditation on life, Maurice Ronet absolutely superb as the doomed man. Changing tack yet again, Le souffle au cœur is a sparkling coming of age period (1950s) comedy which meditates on child rearing as three haute bourgeois sons grow wild courtesy of their equally wild Italian mother (a superbly seductive Lea Massari). The climactic incest caused controversy, Malle demonstrating his mastery at sailing as close as possible to the edge of social taboo in his resolute refusal to either condemn or condone what he shows. Lacombe, Lucien is Malle’s second period piece which tackles another controversial subject – French collaboration during the Nazi occupation – in lucid terms as he demonstrates the impulse towards fascism coming from within the peasantry as well as being imposed from above by the middle class. A radical perception at a time when the left wing always saw fascism as essentially bourgeois, Malle again analyzes his subject without judging, the title character both victimizer and victim as he acts the militiaman and rescues a Jewish family, the daughter of which daringly named ‘France.’Alice in Wonderland meets Luis Buñuel in Black Moon, a dystopian surrealist sci-fi fantasy which J. G. Ballard would have been proud to pen. The film meditates on a teenage girl’s puberty and positively begs for Freudian analysis as we follow her odyssey through a world where men are at war with women to a house where bizarre happenings defy traditional narrative progression, and yet still seem to make sense. Surrounded by documentaries and shot with English-speaking actors (the film exists in two versions and it’s a shame the version included here offers only the French version as Malle said he preferred the English one), the film marked a watershed in Malle’s career. After that he went to America where his third film made there was My Dinner with André, an altogether remarkable conversation film in which two intellectuals talk over dinner almost completely throughout. It should be pretentious, boring and alienating, but is actually completely gripping. Following the conversation closely we notice there’s more action here than in your standard Hollywood action film – it’s a film utterly unlike any other. Malle returned to his own childhood for Au revoir les enfants in which he exorcizes the ghost that haunted him vis his relationship with a Jewish boy in hiding at his boarding school in wartime France who was subsequently discovered by the Gestapo and killed at Auschwitz. One of the greatest evocations of school life ever committed to celluloid, the film is intensely moving in its complete avoidance of sentimentality, and benefits from having been bottled up within Malle for so long until at last he felt ready to deal with an incident Malle later credited for turning him into a filmmaker. Finally, Milou en mai seems to bring Renoir and Godard (La règle du jeu and Week-end) together (again with a smattering of Buñuel in the Jean-Claude Carrière script) in Malle’s portrait of a family gathered to sort out the estate left by the departed matriarch who (because it’s the height of ’68 with all its strikes) they cannot bury. Underlining the director’s roots in the Renoir humanist tradition, it’s a fitting conclusion to this box, and to his career even though two English language films (Damage and Vanya on 42nd Street) still lay ahead of him.As you can see, this box of 10 DVDs contains the core of the feature films. Buy it and the other AE box devoted to his documentaries and you will have the complete essential Malle. The only two you will want that aren’t included are Pretty Baby and Atlantic City. Contrary to Shamdy (whose negative review with nearly 70 votes seems to have succeeded in putting off potential buyers thereby keeping the asking price high!), I find AE’s box to be top quality. The transfers of the films are clear, beautiful, and come with very clean soundtracks. The aspect ratios are all correctly respected and I really fail to see what the ‘problems’ with the discs are. On my widescreen TV the films all come across immaculately. True, there are no extras on the discs, no commentaries, no director interviews, no critical discussion, not even trailers, but this is all made up for by the excellent 100-page book which is totally in English (sometimes a ‘100 page book’ is advertised when it’s the same 30-page article translated into 3 languages!) with appropriate stills from the films. Most of it is Malle himself talking (extracted from Philip French’s Malle on Malle) and giving an essential overview of his work. Then there is Richard Roud telling us (very persuasively) why he thinks Malle’s best are Les amants, Le souffle au cœur, Lacombe, Lucien and Au revoir les enfants (for me he’s mostly correct, though I’d exchange Les amants for Le feu follet even if that doesn’t fit his argument that his chosen 4 are all adaptations of the past and somehow add up to an identifiable authorial voice), and there is a fascinating background essay on My Dinner with André by Wallace Shawn. I find the sturdy box and inner packaging to be very attractive and certainly better than the packaging for other AE sets I have picked up (the three Angelopoulos boxes, the Kiarostami collection, the Haneke box). It even beats the otherwise extremely fine Truffaut boxed set which arrived with the box torn even before I had removed the cellophane wrapping! All in all, AE’s documentation and packaging approaches the very best of what Masters of Cinema has given us in the past (MoC’s Mizoguchi and Imamura boxes remain the benchmark really for DVD boxed set presentation). Do not be put off by negative reviews here on Amazon for this is an essential purchase for those wanting to investigate this great director.I leave here the details of each disc. I will review the films individually on their respective pages.Disc 1LIFT TO THE SCAFFOLD (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) ****(1958, France, 91 min, b/w, aspect ratio: 1.37:1, language: French, subtitles: English)Disc 2THE LOVERS (Les amants) *****(1958, France, 91m, b/w, aspect ratio: 2.35:1, language: French, subtitles: English)Disc 3ZAZIE IN THE MÉTRO (Zazie dans le métro) ***(1960, France, 92 min, color, aspect ratio: 1.66:1, language: French, subtitles: English)Disc 4THE FIRE WITHIN (Le feu follet) *****(1963, France, 108 min, color, aspect ratio: 1.66:1, language: French, subtitles: English)Disc 5MURMUR OF THE HEART (Le souffle au cœur) *****(1971, France/Italy/W. Ger, 118 min, color, aspect ratio: 1.66:1), language: French, subtitles: English)Disc 6LACOMBE, LUCIEN *****(1974, France/Italy/W. Ger, 138 min, color, aspect ratio: 1.66:1, language: French, subtitles: English)Disc 7BLACK MOON *****(1975, France/W. Ger, 101 min, color, aspect ratio: 1.66:1, language: English & French, subtitles: English)Disc 8MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ *****(1983, US, 110 min, color, aspect ratio: 1.66:1, language: English, no subtitles)Disc 9GOODBYE, CHILDREN (Au revoir les enfants) *****(1987, France/Italy/W.Ger, 105 min, color, aspect ratio: 1.66:1, language: French, subtitles: English)Disc 10MAY FOOLS (Milou en mai) *****(1990, France/Italy, 107 min, color, aspect ratio: 1.66:1, language: French, subtitles: English)

Curzon Artificial Eye have done a great job with this release. The box set contains many of Louis Malle’s best films presented beautifully on Blu Ray. Having seen these 10 films previously on DVD, the Blu Rays versions are a great upgrade.

Good to see Louis Malles on Blu-ray DVD remastered and very high quality.

The Curzon-Artifiical Eye Blu-ray box-set 'The Louis Malle Collection' [Released 16/10/17]. Something of a missed opprtunity - delighted to have restorations of some of Malle's films to replace the, mostly Criterion, SD editions I own, but dismayed at the half-hearted effort put into this product. Shamdy's review here highlights some of the techincal failings of this set, there's little I can add to those observations. The trouble for me is that Curzon-Artifical Eye keeps messing up, so I'm finding I have less and less confidence in their competence and now wait for reviews of their new releases to determine whether or not to buy from them.

Complete collection of a master.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive collection of Malle, look no further. The set is great quality and so are the transfers. The only downside is the complete lack of supplements. Other than that it doesn’t get much better at this price. Highly recommended.

Excellent collection. Great to finally have them all on blu-ray

I could not manage getting English sub titles as language subtitle clicking on/off did not work for me.So, I just watched films guessing what they are talking about, as I do not know French language.I have wasted a great deal of time trying to get it right,but it was of no avail. Very annoyed!

All'interno di un cofanetto rigido che raffigura un collage di immagini tratte dai film di Malle, sono custoditi un corposo volumetto (in inglese) dedicato al regista francese e due contenitori che raccolgono cinque film ciascuno. E`possibile vedere le versioni originali e attivare i sottotitoli inglesi. La qualita`delle immagini e del sonoro dei DVD e`altissima. Da un Noir teso e raffinato ("Ascensore per il Patibolo") ad una commedia simpatica e rilassante ("Milou en Mai"), passando attraverso il surrealismo di"Black Moon", Louis Malle non nasconde in nessun modo la sua versatilita`e il suo immenso talento.I film sono quasi tutti dei capolavori assoluti. Dieci opere fondamentali e perfettamente in grado di lasciare senza parole chi ama il Cinema ma ancora non ha avuto l'opportunita`di conoscere questo fantastico regista.Una collezione stupenda che vi fara`innamorare del Grande Cinema Francese! STRACONSIGLIATA!

Je ne renvoie pas l'article, ce manque ne concernant qu'un seul film.

A great set of these great films on blu-ray. Beautiful transfers and good translated subtitles. His most famous films which, in the US, are very hard to find on blu-ray. Much less expensive than the Criterion versions, and few of Louis Malle's films are even available on Criterion blu-ray.But keep in mind that these are Region 2 (Europe) discs, and one must have a multi-region player for them.