Video Dispatches: LE PETIT SOLDAT, THE LIMITS OF CONTROL & DARK WATERS

Video Dispatches is a regular column covering recent home video releases.

Le Petit Soldat (1963) – Criterion Collection

I didn’t release until about halfway through my viewing of Criterion’s restored Le Petit Soldat before realizing I had seen the film before, about 15 years prior, on a VHS tape. Thankfully, Criterion’s new Blu-ray is nearly unrecognizable from that scrambled copy. It looks gorgeous, and as revealed in the supplements, it’s great to see what was actually Jean-Luc Godard ’s second (made) feature given a proper treatment.

What’s interesting is that the film doesn’t play like a runner-up to Breathless , but rather a transitional film that marks a bridge between the vibrant and playful early films about boys and girls bouncing around and the political films he would follow those up with in the later half of the sixties. Its political content, which targets and depicts torture during the Algerian War.

This was the first film Godard made with Anna Karina, and I’m surprised at the level of restraint he shows regarding her face in close-up. It’s one of cinema’s most evocative faces and it feels special to see him discover as much during the tenement exchanges between her character and Michel Subor’s protagonist.

The supplements are great archival pieces, including Subor being interviewed while bouncing inside of a boxing ring, and Godard shit-talking the bourgeoisie critical apprehension of “social realism.”

The Limits of Control (2009) – Arrow Films

Much like last year’s The Dead Don’t Die, Jim Jarmusch’s effort one decade prior, The Limits of Control , was widely panned, including a 0.5/4 review from Roger Ebert, where he assumes the voice of the film’s protagonist. Because of its reputation, and my pure laziness, I let my old DVD sit unwatched for many years, but finally getting to the film on Arrow’s gorgeous new disc was an absolute treat.

Shot by the inimitable Christopher Doyle, the film follows Isaach De Bankole ’s taciturn hitman on a mysterious journey across urban and rural Spain as he sips espresso, exchanges matchbooks with strangers and eventually makes a hit. But thankfully, Jarmusch knows all the stuff leading up to the hit is much more interesting than the “climax.”

This is his riff on Jean-Pierre Melville ’s Le Samourai, while also being a mish-mash of his catalogue: the vignette-esque plotting, the zen killer of Ghost Dog, the electric guitar OST that recalls Dead Man and the ritual-based rhythms he would later explore in more depth with Paterson. And like he did more overtly in The Dead Don’t Die, Jarmusch inserts metatextual comments on the work, to more success here.

As J. Hoberman put it in his contemporary review for the Village Voice, “The contents of the package are unknowable; the twine that wraps around its enigma is everything.” And the two new supplements on Arrow’s disc, a chat with Geoff Andrew and a video essay, are terrific and entertaining attempts to expound on that twine. Also, Arrow thankfully include archival features from the DVD, including a 50-minute making-of. I can’t recommend this release enough.

Dark Waters (2019) – Universal Pictures

If the reaction for the trailer of Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters , a procedural legal drama about exposing DuPont’s decades-long systematic poisoning, was skeptical among many (not all) of his champions, I can only imagine casual moviegoers were even less interested. Though they’re perhaps not very common now, fatigue from the 90’s legal drama trend might still have its claws in folks. That’s probably why Dark Waters didn’t pick up any awards steam, and while numbers of its budget aren’t easily available online, it couldn’t have made a profit with its $14 million worldwide box office return.

That’s a shame because it is, for my money, the finest film of 2019. Buoyed by a riveting supporting performance from Bill Camp, as a farmer whose cows have become diseased, the terrific, and sadly unsung, digital photography of Edward Lachman (Haynes couldn’t get the budget for film), and Haynes’s existential understanding of corporate machinations, Dark Waters is far from a run-of-the-mill legal drama. It’s absolutely terrifying, and Haynes does well to recognize that these problems are affecting nearly all Americans. DuPont’s crimes aren’t contained in the film’s two-hour runtime; we don’t get to leave happy that their feet have been held to the fire. It’s domestic terrorism caused by capitalism.

Universal’s disc comes with three special features about the film’s making, which total add up to only about 12 minutes and don’t distinguish themselves enough to warrant separate segments. And while they’re mostly cobbled from press junkets, there’s some interesting tidbits about the real-life victims playing themselves, location scouting and how Mark Ruffalo was able to produce a film that went much deeper than the New York Times Magazine article it’s based on.