44 Allonsanfan

[swo17]

Allonsanfan



After the fall of Napoleon, the Restoration begins. Fulvio (Marcello Mastroianni, La dolce vita), an aristocrat who has dedicated his life to the revolution has become disillusioned and his cowardice keeps him from joining his comrades. As he struggles to manage his evasion and lies he gets swept up in a suicidal uprising in Southern Italy. Stunningly photographed with lush period detail and featuring the Taviani brothers' trademark magic realism and absurdist irony, Allonsanfàn has Mastroianni on top form as the reluctant insurgent and one of Ennio Morricone's finest scores. Radiance Films is proud to present this essential film on Blu-ray for the first time in the world.

LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES:

• New 2K restoration of the film from the original negative, presented on Blu-ray for the first time in the world
• Original uncompressed mono PCM audio
• Audio commentary by critic Michael Brooke
• Archival interview with the Taviani brothers by critic Gideon Bachmann in which they discuss filmmaking approaches, the role of the director, the future of cinema and more (57 mins)
• Original trailer
• Newly translated English subtitles
• Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters
• Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Italian cinema expert Robert Lumley and a newly translated contemporary interview with the Taviani brothers
• Single pressing of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

[MichaelB]

And the most bonkers Blu-ray.com comment about this release goes to...

[yoloswegmaster]

Is it all that surprising that a Blu-Ray.com forum user didn't bother to fully read the specs before posting some nonsense? Also, wasn't that user a former poster on here?

[MichaelB]

Yes, I think he was driven away by an almost certainly false accusation that he was our regular troll.

(If anyone thinks that the latter has popped up again, the sensible thing is to quietly alert the mods behind the scenes. I've rarely seen an accusation posted here that's turned out to have any substance behind it, whereas my own privately-conveyed hunches have usually been bang on the money. This particular troll has stylistic tics that give him away well before he stages his usual performative meltdown, which Trobrianders wasn't displaying.)

[Aunt Peg]

Just last week I saw for the first time St. Michaeal Had a Rooster (1972) which the Taviani brothers directed prior to Allonsanfàn. Hopefully it too will turn up in the near future and I'll definitely be purchasing Allonsanfàn having not seen it in about 40 years.

[MichaelB]

One of my challenges with the commentary is that St Michael is in many ways a dry run for Allonsanfàn (the two films are often grouped together in books on the Tavianis, especially the Italian ones), but I have to assume that the typical listener won’t have seen it, or indeed the Tavianis’ first four features.

I myself didn’t get a chance to see them until about a dozen years ago, and I could hardly be more of a rabid Taviani fan - and even then I had to rely on unsubtitled Italian DVDs. (Or rather, subtitled for the hard of hearing in Italian, but that’s better than nothing.)

[Drucker]

Playing at MOMA in early January as part of a Morricone retrospective for those in NYC.

[MichaelB]

A shame the author of the blurb gets the historical period wrong by several decades - Allonsanfàn is set during the post-1815 Restoration (Restaurazione), not the post-1860 Risorgimento.

In fact, a point that I make in the commentary is that the Sublime Brothers, the insurrectionary sect at the film's heart, are doomed from the start because they're active in the wrong historical epoch - and their tragedy is that they don't (indeed, cannot) realise this.

[Calvin]

The BFI Southbank are having a two-month-long season dedicated to the Taviani Brothers starting in February. Allonsanfan will be screening, as will a 4K restoration of St. Michael Had a Rooster.

[AidanKing]

Radiance appear to be taking the same pre-emptive approach to potential classification issues as Eureka did with the Zulawski set. 'Allonsanfan' is advertised with an 18 certificate on the Radiance website but has been classified as 15 by the BBFC.

[MichaelB]

Blueprint Review.

[domino harvey]

This is an incredible film, and it really feels like a would-be “classic” canon movie of the era that somehow got lost in the shuffle. Mastroianni gives a performance that is so fully aligned with his strengths and previous screen heights that it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role as he bounces from encounter to encounter with the Brotherhood, forever unable to explicate himself from their political folly despite his best efforts at being the worst. Additionally, the film showcases a great use of color, moments of spontaneous song and dance which feel fully in spirit with the Jancso films of this period, and most crucially, a darkly comic energy given to all the assorted ironies encountered which keep this from ever imploding into self-seriousness. Can’t imagine a safer blind buy than this, and I look forward to others here weighing in once they see this. Kudos to Radiance for rescuing this!

[MichaelB]

It was originally going to be the Tavianis' third feature, starring Gian Maria Volontè, made circa 1965, but their producer Giuliani G. De Negri said that it would need a bigger budget than he was realistically capable of raising back then. So they shelved it - and then had a radical rethink following post-1968 disillusionment, making the protagonist Fulvio far more hesitant and indecisive than they'd originally conceived. Realising that the part no longer fit Volontè, they started casting around for a replacement.

They recognised very early on that Marcello Mastroianni would be absolutely perfect (as you say, it's pretty much impossible to imagine anyone else in the part), but he was notionally out of their league (they'd worked with Volontè since 1962, when all three were pretty much unknown) - but their friend Marco Ferreri was making La Grande Bouffe and promised to put in a good word for their project. As it happened, the then Paris-based Mastroianni was actively looking for something strongly "Italian", as he'd been feeling culturally homesick, and Allonsanfàn was pretty much perfect in every way.

And yes, Miklós Jancsó does get mentioned in the commentary - I could hardly ignore him! Although it's very much a Taviani film too; they'd very much nailed their instantly recognisable style by then.

[domino harvey]

Interesting. I followed this up with the Tavianis' Volonte-starring Sotto il segno dello scorpione and while I did not like it at all (My fault, as I knew better going in since the radical left wing of Cahiers post-68 bolstered it as a superior example of political cinema and I've seen enough of the films they praise in this regard to know the score), it was interesting to see Volonte mostly wasted and set adrift within a film that probably only needed him for funding. It did feature a preview of the folk dancing found here, so there's that! Honestly, I am even more impressed with how good Allonsanfan is compared to how bad Sotto... was just five years earlier.

If I loved this but hated Sotto... and Padre Padrone, what film of theirs should I try next? This was so great that I have to believe it wasn't a one off for me and they can reach similar heights, but man, what a contrast

[MichaelB]

Based on those criteria, The Night of the Shooting Stars is an easy recommendation (I unreservedly adore that film, and watching it umpteen times when prepping my debut commentary didn't put me off it at all), plus Kaos with the proviso that like all portmanteau films some parts are better than others (although the highs are really vertiginously high).

And St Michael Had a Rooster is in many ways a natural companion-piece to Allonsanfàn, as it's also about a failed 19th-century revolutionary, only in his case he's in prison for a fair chunk of the narrative, where he devises all sorts of grandiose plans that prove hopelessly impractical when tested against the real world - much as happens in the last few minutes of Allonsanfàn.

In fact, come to think of it, St Michael's protagonist Giulio Manieri (Giulio Brogi) may well be based on their original conception of Fulvio Imbriani - I didn't go into that much detail in my Allonsanfàn commentary thanks to the strong probability that listeners won't have seen the earlier film, which wasn't distributed in the UK in any form and I think has only ever had patchy US distribution. (I watched it via an imported Italian DVD.)

[rrenault]

This is an incredible film, and it really feels like a would-be “classic” canon movie of the era that somehow got lost in the shuffle. Mastroianni gives a performance that is so fully aligned with his strengths and previous screen heights that it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role as he bounces from encounter to encounter with the Brotherhood, forever unable to explicate himself from their political folly despite his best efforts at being the worst. Additionally, the film showcases a great use of color, moments of spontaneous song and dance which feel fully in spirit with the Jancso films of this period, and most crucially, a darkly comic energy given to all the assorted ironies encountered which keep this from ever imploding into self-seriousness. Can’t imagine a safer blind buy than this, and I look forward to others here weighing in once they see this. Kudos to Radiance for rescuing this!

I’m looking forward to watching this film, and I was wondering, as he was mentioned in this thread, if Marco Ferreri is also somewhat who just got lost in the shuffle overtime, even though La Grande Bouffe was a mainstream success at the time. He doesn’t have the “canonical” status of Bunuel or Pasolini, both of whom were in a similar thematic wheelhouse to him.

[MichaelB]

Since I'm more than used to discs that I contributed to being released to resounding silence or just one or two reviews, I've been very pleasantly surprised by how much in-depth coverage this has got - including an excellent, thorough review in the other place (not by you-know-who, thankfully, although it might have been quite fun to see a frothingly right-wing take on this particular film!)

• Blueprint Review (David Brook)
• Blu-ray.com (Jeffrey Kauffmann)
• Elements of Madness (Andrew J. Eisenman - an absolute rave)
• Film Authority
• Filmhounds (Theo Rollason)
• The Geek Show (Mark Cunliffe)
• Inside Pulse (Joe Corey)

Plus a pretty decent YouTube review from Man vs Film, who admits upfront that it's outside his usual comfort zone and ends up genuinely surprised by how much he liked it.

[ryannichols7]

I'm trying to go through my 2023 backlog before watching any of my 2024 discs, but between MichaelB's passion for this movie and dom's glowing review above, this is probably going to be the first '24 disc I've watched. I hope it's selling a ton, been very glad to see all the attention it's gotten in comparison to the previous Taviani box (which I did snag a copy of on ebay!)

[Finch]

It did not show up on the availability watch that Radiance released as part of their newsletter today. By way of contrast, Bounty Hunter hasn't released yet but is already 50% sold out in both the UK and US.

[ryannichols7]

I think it's expected Japanese stuff with swords will do better, and not surprised it's 50% already before it's even formally released. considering the other single pressing title so far (we won't count the Yoshida yet as it hasn't been released) is only just now getting to 90%/80%, I think an Allonsanfan sellout by the end of 2024 would probably constitute "good sales", but I also am just pulling this out of thin air

I wonder if the BFI session has boosted the profile of the Tavianis alongside this release. a friend of mine in London who's a very casual movie watcher went to see something at Southbank and asked me if I knew more about them, since they're on the cover of the monthly program

[zedz]

This is an incredible film, and it really feels like a would-be “classic” canon movie of the era that somehow got lost in the shuffle. Mastroianni gives a performance that is so fully aligned with his strengths and previous screen heights that it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role as he bounces from encounter to encounter with the Brotherhood, forever unable to explicate himself from their political folly despite his best efforts at being the worst. Additionally, the film showcases a great use of color, moments of spontaneous song and dance which feel fully in spirit with the Jancso films of this period, and most crucially, a darkly comic energy given to all the assorted ironies encountered which keep this from ever imploding into self-seriousness. Can’t imagine a safer blind buy than this, and I look forward to others here weighing in once they see this. Kudos to Radiance for rescuing this!

Watched this last night, and it is indeed a great film with a delightfully slippery tone. Mastroianni is about as anti- as a hero can get, but you can't shake the sense that he's fundamentally right all the way through. It's a role that doesn't just require precision acting to carry off, but the right persona at the outset. It's a very dark comedy, and every time Mastroianni runs into his comrades it's both funnier and more horrible.