Kino Lorber offers an attentive restoration of a neglected, greatly prescient sci-fi masterpiece.
It’s the film’s strikingly modern moral and philosophical debates that make it look as if it were made yesterday.
Like the anonymous entwined bodies glimpsed in its opening moments, things tend to commingle in Resnais’s revolutionary first feature.
Resnais’s film opens on a formally conservative note and proceeds to rip it to shreds.
Most problematic is the way in which the Vietnamese are romanticized, as if they had not fought for their livelihoods and land, visceral and specific, but for ideals alone.
With magnificent gentleness, Claude Sautet sketches a half-dozen indelible portraits.
The film’s nihilist point is clear: It’s the world against Trelkovsky and not the other way around.
One of Polanski’s greatest films gets a handsome transfer on this DVD edition.