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As with Andrzej Zulawski's La femme publique, we once again seem to have a curious situation whereby the same master yields dramatically different results depending on who was responsible for the encoding. The new 2009 North American release by Mondo Vision clearly trounces the competition and is striking not just because it looks so much better than its European counterparts but also significantly different in terms of colour timing. A featurette on the DVD states that Zulawski himself was consulted in order "to return the film to its original appearance as closely as possible", so it seems reasonable to assume that the more richly saturated palette on the MV release is correct.

Grain reproduction on this edition is also superior to that of any other edition, with the texture of the film stock coming alive in a way that the other releases can't hope to compete with. The MV edition also sports additional clean-up of print damage, demonstrated in the aforementioned restoration featurette. While the changes are for the most part fairly subtle, they do indicate the amount of care that went into this release.

Certainly, in comparison, the three other releases looks incredibly murky, with the German release by New Entertainment World faring particularly badly. Not only is it lacking in definition and extremely poorly compressed, it has also been reformatted from the film's intended aspect ratio of 1.66:1, crudely zooming in the image and truncating the top and bottom of the frame. The other two European releases - French and Spanish - are at least in the proper ratio, but their noticeably undersaturated colours, inferior grain reproduction and overall less impressive detail levels make them less than desirable.

Superficially, the American and Spanish discs seem to be on even footing as far as audio is concerned, in that both include English subtitles, permitting English-speaking viewers to watch the film in its original French - the French release having no English support whatsoever, while the German release limits English speakers to watching an inferior dub. However, as with the transfer, MV collaborated with Zulawski to ensure an improved subtitle translation, meaning that the captions on the American DVD are more accurate to the director's intentions than those on the Spanish disc.

Finally, the MV release comes up trumps in terms of extras. While an archival interview with Zulawski that is duplicated from the French DVD is bafflingly presented in a compromised widescreen format, which reframes the original 1.33:1 image by clumsily zooming it in, the real meat and potatoes is to be found in the audio commentary, in which Zulawski, interviewed by Daniel Bird, delivers a frank and candid account of his experiences making the film, sparing no detail about Fabio Testi's intellect (or lack thereof), Romy Schneider's penchant for booze, and how Klaus Kinski really ended up in the movie.