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Sunday, July 19, 2009

BD impressions: Flame and Citron

4:45 PM / BD Impressions / No Comments

Flame and Citron is an interesting film: an attempt to tell a film noir-style thriller in Nazi-occupied Denmark, focusing on a pair of real-life assassins working for the resistance movement, from whose code names the film's title is derived. With a budget of around 45 million krone (over $10 million US), this is the mos expensive Danish film ever made, and it certainly looks the part, with Jørgen Johansson's slick cinematography, replete with immaculate compositions and clouds of billowing smoke. The plot is a little on the muddled side, however, with the continual double- and triple-crossing twists never quite ringing true, while a handful of narrow escapes are a little far-fetched (the least convincing involves one character creating a clumsy diversion to allow another to simply walk out of a heavily guarded Nazi compound). Still, it's nicely paced with some decent set-pieces, and it calls attention to an aspect of World War 2 history that tends to receive little attention. I don't doubt that other films have been made about the Danish resistance movement (which by all accounts emerged as one of the most organised and effective in Europe, their successes including managing to evacuate almost the entire Jewish population to neutral Sweden), but I'm not personally familiar with any of them.

Metrodome's all-region UK release looks pretty good, and indeed excellent in some respects, but in other is deeply flawed. Our old friends the elevated blacks are out in full force, as is filtering: ringing is apparent around high contrast edges (see Example 3) and on the letterboxing at the top and bottom of the frame, and the image rarely possesses the level of crispness that I suspect was in the source material. I'm also inclined to suspect that some degree of grain reduction has been applied. On the plus side, the encoding is up to snuff, and detail is for the most part pretty pleasing. A decent but not exactly stellar release. 8/10

Flame and Citron
studio: Metrodome; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 19.8 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 20.93 Mbit/sec

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