Americano Blu-ray Review
The Scrapbooks We Carry Inside Us
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, October 28, 2012
In a signature line from David Lynch's twisted coming-of-age film,
Blue Velvet, the young hero
is told, "I can't figure out if you're a detective or a pervert." The same could be said for Martin,
the protagonist of director, writer and star Mathieu Demy's
Americano, a deceptively simple tale
about a forty-ish man who makes unexpected discoveries while dealing with the death of his
mother. Because Demy is the son of two fabled French directors, Jacques Demy (
The Umbrellas
of Cherbourg) and Agnès Varda (
One Sings, The Other Doesn't), too many reviewers have
viewed
Americano solely through the prisms of his parents' works. Having been raised in a
family steeped in cinema, Demy has obviously made a film bearing the stamp of that heritage;
how could it not? Demy even incorporates clips from his mother's 1981 film
Documenteur,
where he appeared at age nine playing a boy named "Martin", whose childhood is similar to the
memories of Martin in
Americano. (Steven Soderbergh used a similar device in 1991's
The
Limey, where clips from a 32-year-old film starring Terence Stamp represented the memories of
Stamp's current character, now much older.)
But children are never mere carbon copies of their parents, and
Americano is far more than a
hybrid of the styles of Demy's parents. Demy's life and cinematic experience range far beyond
his parents' films. Among other things, he has absorbed the casual genre-hopping and
plotbending that have become almost second nature to confident filmmakers in the last 30 years.
The result is a film that repeatedly and unexpectedly changes direction, although Demy, like all
good storytellers, never loses sight of where he started and eventually gets back there. Even when
he's doing something that invokes the family tradition, Demy does it
his way. As he says in the
intriguing interview included on the disc, Demy asked Catherine Deneuve's daughter, Chiara
Mastroianni, to play his love interest in
Americano not only because Deneuve was his father's
favorite actress, but also because he and Mastroianni have known each other for a long time and
he admires her as an actress—she's
his generation.
Americano opens with Martin (Demy) and Claire (Mastroianni) having sex. It's an awkward
scene filled with mixed signals: a paradigm of Martin's whole life. Later, Martin receives a
phone call informing him that his mother has died, and he collapses.
As Martin visits with his gruff father (Jean-Pierre Mocky) to discuss arrangements, the broad
outlines of the family history emerge. As a child, Martin lived with his mother in Los Angeles
after his parents separated. Later, she remained behind, while Martin returned to France to live
with his father. The marriage was never happy (she didn't talk to me, even when we lived
together, the father complains), and Martin's father was less than enthusiastic as a parent. When
Martin mentions that Claire wants to have a baby, his father advises against it, because "kids are
a pain in the ass". He does find his son useful at the moment, however, because Martin is a real
estate agent, and someone has to go to America and sell his late mother's apartment. As it
happens, Martin also has a U.S. passport (which confirms that he was born on American soil).
Martin flies to L.A. as if to his own funeral. He's greeted by his mother's long-time and
emotional friend, Linda (Geraldine Chaplin, almost bursting out of the frame with the same
manic energy she displayed in
Nashville more than 35 years earlier). As Martin cleans out the
apartment and wanders through the complex he vaguely recalls, he's haunted by fragmented
memories of the enigmatic woman he knew as a child. (The scenes are from
Documenteur and
feature the late Sabine Mamou with the young Demy.)
At the window of a neighboring apartment, Martin spots an old man he remembers from many
years ago, who was always writing, then on a typewriter, now on a Powerbook (in the archive
footage, the writer was Gary Feldman; in the new footage, he is Nick Roberts). The writer tells
Martin about a Mexican girl named Lola, with whom he used to play. Lola, says the writer,
became very special to your mother after you left. When Martin asks Linda about this girl, the
elderly lady instantly becomes angry and defensive.
Before long, Martin finds himself on Lola's trail, with an address from his mother's papers and a
photograph from the writer. The trail leads to a strip joint named "Americano" at the end of a
dark alley in Tijuana, where Lola (Salma Hayek) turns out to be a stripper in a red wig with a
jagged scar on her right cheek. She'll talk to Martin, but only if he pays her—and she doesn't
want to remember the past. By this point, the film has taken a hard left into pulp and film noir,
complete with femme fatale, contested property (it turns out the deceased mother may have left
her apartment to Lola and not Martin), an investigation with mixed motives, a secret locker and a
shady character with menace in his smile (Carlos Bardem, older brother of Javier). The simple
Parisian bourgeois, Martin, is as unprepared for this world as the viewer of
Americano, and I
found the transition bracing precisely because it's done so casually, as if it were the most natural
thing in the world. (Some viewers, though, may find it strange and offputting.)
Fans of French cinema will recognize "Lola" as the name of Jacques Demy's 1960 film about a
cabaret singer whom the protagonist knew as a teenager. But the elder Demy's
Lola was a very
different kind of film; Demy Sr. described it as "a musical without music", whereas
Americano
often feels, in its latter half, like an emotional disaster film—in slow motion—as Martin plunges
thoughtlessly into one dangerous situation after another, seeking . . . what exactly? In the
accompanying interview, Demy speaks of the grieving process and how it is specific to each
individual and entirely unpredictable.
Americano sketches a portrait of one person, then slyly draws
you in while that person's world is shattered, rearranged and (maybe) opened up by grief. The
film's ending will divide viewers. Some may feel cheated or let down, while others (myself
included) will want to return to the beginning and take a fresh look at Martin.
Americano Blu-ray, Video Quality
Grainophobes, beware! I am giving MPI Media's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray of
Americano
high marks for video, and any member of Blu-ray.com's discussion forum who wonders how that
can possibly be, in light of the screenshots, obviously hasn't read this explanation.
My primary criterion for a Blu-ray image is
accuracy, and the Blu-ray of
Americano accurately
reproduces the film's image. That image comes from two sources:
- Contemporary Super16 photography—in other words, half the resolution of the
more common Super35 format—cropped to 2.35:1 for widescreen display.
Demy explains in the extras that he adopted this format so that he could establish
a "dialogue" with the second source described below.
- Unrestored (deliberately unrestored) excerpts from Documenteur, the 1981 film
by Agnès Varda in which Demy appeared as a child and which provides the
material for Martin's memories of his mother. Documenteur was shot full-frame
in Academy ratio on 35mm but in a grainy documentary style. The excerpts
appear in Americano windowboxed in the center of the 2.35:1 frame.
Because contemporary 16mm stock has excellent resolution, the results are still remarkably
detailed, but it has much more obvious grain than we typically see with 35mm film, and the Blu-ray accurately reproduces the resulting textured look.
Even if you're not particularly sensitive to
grain, you're aware of the film's distinctive appearance from the moment
Americano begins.
(The cinematographer was the accomplished Georges Lechaptois.)
The color scheme, which Demy chose with care, ranges from the chilly blues of the opening
French sequences, to the more varied but bleached-out colors of Los Angeles, to the warm tones
of Tijuana. The Blu-ray reproduces these shades and contrasts with precision, and the accuracy is
underlined by such elements as the depth of the blacks in the Tijuana nights and the precisely
saturated red of the Mustang that plays an important role in the latter half of the film.
Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), the film's grain has not been reduced or filtered, and no
sharpening has been applied. Aside from light, occasional banding that I doubt most viewers will
notice, there were no artifacts to be seen, compression or otherwise.
Americano Blu-ray, Audio Quality
The Blu-ray's DTS-HD MA 5.1 track beautifully recreates
Americano's distinctive and subtly
engineered soundtrack. Demy may not have any action scenes to work with, but that doesn't stop
him from using the full resources of modern motion picture sound technology to express
Martin's inner state. The film's sound routinely shifts between real and unreal, often without
warning and by subtle transition. When Martin first hears Lola sing, the sound goes wildly out of
synch and eventually her lips stop moving altogether; as the camera moves toward Martin, it
becomes obvious that what he's hearing (and possibly seeing) differs from what's happening on
the stage. When Martin arrives at the Los Angeles morgue to sign a release for his mother's
body, he is escorted down a long hall by a sepulchral mortician who seems to be ushering him to
the grave. As Martin approaches his "destination", everything drops away but the sounds of
fluorescent lights buzzing and Martin breathing, and these grow to dominate the track as an
embalmed body appears out of focus in the background. Gradually, however, another sonic
presence announces itself in the background of the track, and at first you're not quite sure what it
is. As the balance shifts, you realize that it's musical, familiar and wholly out of character with
the sober piano score by Grégoire Hetzel (
Incendies) that has dominated the soundtrack until that
point. It's a pop song I won't identify, because that would be something of a spoiler. The song
signals a change in the film's direction, like a switch going off in Martin's head. A few scenes
later, it has been reduced to source music on a radio.
Americano has its share of typical environmental sound cues, especially in the Tijuana scenes
and local hangouts, but the truly memorable sonic elements are all of an expressive quality such
as those described above (including an elaborate sequence of crosscutting near the end). It's a
first-rate track.
Use the thumbs up and thumbs down icons to agree or disagree that the title is similar to Americano. You can also suggest completely new similar titles to Americano in the search box below.
