192 Impossible Object (aka Story of a Love Story)

[MichaelB]

IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT
(John Frankenheimer, 1973)
Release date: 22 January 2023

Limited Edition Blu-ray (World premiere) - pre-order here (UK) or here (US)

Directed by John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate), Impossible Object (also released as Story of a Love Story) is a surreal drama starring Alan Bates (A Day in the Death of Joe Egg), Michel Auclair (The Day of the Jackal), Dominique Sanda (The Conformist), and Lea Massari (L'avventura).

Harry (Bates), a British author living in France with his wife and family, begins an affair with Natalie (Sanda), who herself is unhappily married to Georges (Auclair). However, Harry is unable to untangle the facts of his life from the fictions which he creates, and the line between fantasy and reality become blurred.

Adapted by Nicholas Mosley (Accident) from his own Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, photographed by Claude Renoir (Barbarella), and scored by Michel Legrand (Eve), Impossible Object is a long-overlooked classic of seventies European cinema.

LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K restoration
• Two presentations of the film: Impossible Object, the original French theatrical cut (113 mins); and Story of a Love Story, the alternative English-language international cut (104 mins)
• Original mono audio
• Audio commentary with film expert Tim Lucas (2023)
• Interview with John Frankenheimer (1973): extract from the French television programme Cinéma à, in which the director discusses the first public screening of Impossible Object
• Stories of a Love Story (2023): video comparison analysing the differences between the two versions of the film
• Image gallery: publicity and promotional material
• Newly translated English subtitles for the French theatrical cut
• New and improved English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for the English-language international cut
• Limited edition exclusive 36-page booklet with a new essay by Adam Scovell, a look at the work of Nicholas Mosley and the themes of the source novel, excerpts from John Frankenheimer interviews, an overview of contemporary critical responses, and film credits
• World premiere on Blu-ray
• Limited edition of 4,000 copies for the UK and US

All extras subject to change

#PHILE192B
BBFC Cert: TBC
REGION A/B
EAN: 5060697920574

[beamish14]

WOW. I never thought I’d see this one get an HD release. I had no clue that there are two distinct cuts of it

[MichaelB]

No, it's a film that's passed so far under the radar that I can easily see how people might not have known this, if only because they never thought to compare the two (or indeed had the opportunity to do so until now).

It's a bit like 90° in the Shade, where I didn't turn up a single written reference to there being two distinct versions, and I must have investigated every scrap of English-language coverage of this film (plus a fair amount of Czech) when researching my commentary. Again, I suspect nobody thought to compare the two - I only did so by accident when I watched the Czech version purely out of curiosity as to why the running time was different beyond the usual PAL speedup explanation and was fascinated to find that the films didn't have a single shot in common, despite telling the same story with the same actors.

Although Impossible Object isn't a case of each version being made up of wholly different takes - I reconstructed the shorter English cut from StudioCanal's 4K master of the French cut, using a BBC broadcast as a reference, and so can confirm first hand that there's no unique material. There are, though, some very substantial differences - I had to cut the 4K master up into no fewer than 64 separate sections before I was able to precisely match the English cut; in addition to cuts to shorten the running time, scenes are reshuffled into different parts of the film.

The shorter cut is the one with the most live sound, with English characters speaking English and French characters speaking French, except when it's situationally appropriate to speak English. But the French dub works surprisingly well - all the English characters have been living in France for years, so it's entirely believable that they'd speak French, and Alan Bates dubbed himself. It seems that he spoke decent French, a legacy of lying about his command of the language when cast in Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts (like all actors, he'd say yes and then scramble to catch up before shooting started), and then took intensive French classes prior to the shoot and making a point of only speaking French on set - which wasn't difficult, as he was the only native English speaker involved, and French was the on and off-set language. By the end he was apparently perfectly competent, and certainly good enough to play a French-language part where a strong English accent is wholly justified.

[beamish14]

I’m a big fan of Frankenheimer’s “lost” era that includes this, The Horsemen, and the wonderful 99 and 44/100% Dead. In a happy coincidence, Dalkey Archive is reissuing Moseley’s novel in a few weeks

[knives]

I’ve only seen the international cut, but I’d put this down as a winner. Can’t wait to see it again as I don’t remember why I like it.

[crimlaw]

Was this film actually released? There is very little written about this film, which is unusual since it’s from a major film director.

[beamish14]

Was this film actually released? There is very little written about this film, which is unusual since it’s from a major film director.

I do not believe that it ever received a theatrical release in the States, but it did get a VHS in the mid-80’s

[reaky]

Word of mouth on the film isn’t great, but there’s no one to match Indicator in the excavation of outsider film and obscurities like this. Bravo.

[GaryC]

Was this film actually released? There is very little written about this film, which is unusual since it’s from a major film director.

In the UK, it's had at least a couple of showings on the BBC in 1995 and 1998, under the Story of a Love Story title. But it doesn't appear on the BBFC website that I can find, and the BFI Collections site doesn't log any contemporary UK reviews, so it looks like the film has never had a commercial UK release until now.

I read the novel, a shortlistee for the first ever Booker Prize in 1969, years ago, but couldn't say much about it now. There's a copy in Hampshire libraries, so I might reread it before watching the film. Incidentally, Mosley's earlier novel Accident was also filmed. And another shortlistee for the first Booker was Barry England's Figures in a Landscape, which like Accident got a film version directed by Joseph Losey.

[jlnight]

As well as the BBC1 screenings in 1995 and 1998, the film was also shown on ITV (London) in 1982 and 1985. The first of those screenings was as part of one of their Continental film seasons. All broadcasts were under the Story of a Love Story title.

[MichaelB]

A fair chunk of even the "English" version is in French - I totted up 124 subtitles when prepping the Indicator ones - so I can see why they picked it. And I don't imagine Alan Bates headlining a "Continental" film did it any harm in terms of publicity.

He's wonderful in this - after shooting The Fixer, Frankenheimer called him "the finest young actor I have ever worked with", and was obviously very keen to work with him again. To quote him in more detail:

Bates was an angel - getting up at three in the morning for scenes in below-zero weather, behaving in an exemplary and professional manner at all times, remembering all his lines. What made Alan all the more admirable was that two of his colleagues were such rotters - [one of them] couldn't or wouldn't learn his lines, and, worse, Dirk Bogarde flatly tried to sabotage Alan and the film by missing cues and reading his lines badly. Bogarde is an impossible human being. But Alan? He always knew his lines, and generously did his off-camera lines [to other actors, for their close-ups] with all the care and brilliance of his on-camera lines.

[crimlaw]

The Fixer is also hard to find. It was released on VHS, but the film never had a dvd or blu ray release in Region 1 due to rights issues. From what i understand, Malamud’s estate was never a fan of the film. It’s a shame, since it’s one of Frankenheimer best film’s and should be preserved and released.

[CSM126]

Impossible Beaver

[TechnicolorAcid]

(AKA Story of a Beaver Story)

[MichaelB]

The reason why the screencaps for the short and long versions look to all intents and purposes identical is that they had the same source at base - StudioCanal's 4K restoration, which fuelled everything in the shorter cut aside from the English-language opening and closing titles (we got those from an archival print, which is why the quality unavoidably dips at those points - the resolution is fine, but the contrast is noticeably higher, as is always the way with scans sourced from projection prints).

We ruled out seamless branching at a very early stage (there are something like 64 differences, including shots reshuffled into different parts of the film, which would have been a QC nightmare), but with the same video source being given a near-identical bitrate in the final encodes, there really shouldn't be any noticeable difference.

It'll be fascinating to see detailed write-ups of the longer cut, because I'm pretty certain that this is the first time it's ever been made available in English-friendly form, half a century after it played in French cinemas. Every English-language review to date is all but certain to be of the shorter cut, most likely from one of its sporadic TV broadcasts.

[tenia]

We ruled out seamless branching at a very early stage (there are something like 64 differences, including shots reshuffled into different parts of the film, which would have been a QC nightmare)

I saw that the bulk of the 2 presentations seemed extremely similar and thought that could have been why seamless branching was ruled out, so it's good to have a confirmation.

[MichaelB]

Blueprint Review.

[MichaelB]

We ruled out seamless branching at a very early stage (there are something like 64 differences, including shots reshuffled into different parts of the film, which would have been a QC nightmare)

I saw that the bulk of the 2 presentations seemed extremely similar and thought that could have been why seamless branching was ruled out, so it's good to have a confirmation.

The first thing we assess is whether seamless branching is an option, but in general it helps if the film can be broken up into a small number of big segments rather than a large number of tiny segments. It also helps if the changes are mainly concentrated in a particular section of the film, as opposed to being spread out throughout the entire running time. Story of a Love Story very much ticked the latter box, so it wasn't really viable as a branching project.

Conversely, Age of Consent suited seamless branching very well, because most of the video differences were in the first few minutes (it feels like more because the soundtrack is different, what with the replacement score, but visually the two cuts are mostly the same), so I just rendered two separate opening segments for each cut. I was particularly keen for that to work as a seamlessly-branched disc, because although we had The Boy Who Turned Yellow from the start, I advised my colleagues not to announce it until we were certain that we could seamlessly branch the main feature, because if we had to go to two separate feature encodes, we wouldn't have enough space.

[charal]

I got my copy today. Interesting film. I noticed that Bates and Evans dubbed themselves in French in the long version. What I’m not sure of is why it seemed a bit off at times. After watching Michael’s feature I noticed that the English versions seemed spot on. I assume all the takes used in both versions were originally filmed in English then dubbed accordingly.

[MichaelB]

The film was certainly primarily shot in English, although conversations between French characters were shot in French.

Both Alan Bates and Evans Evans (and her husband John Frankenheimer, come to that) spoke decent French, hence them dubbing themselves - and because it’s so obviously Bates doing it I found I wasn’t the least bit distracted by the lack of perfect lipsync; the mere fact that it’s obviously him acting in French was fascinating enough.

[MichaelB]

Musique Machine:

Impossible Object certainly is a highly original and distinctive take on the romantic drama form- been both creative and thought-provoking. As we’ve come to expect from Powerhouse we get a lovely new print of the film, and a selection of most interesting extras.

(There's also a review by you-know-who at Blu-ray.com, which could hardly have been lazier - he only watched the shorter cut, and there's no evidence of him watching or listening to any of the extras.)

[MichaelB]

CineOutsider:

A fascinating work that quickly grew on me and that really does reward multiple viewings, which for me revealed subtle and clever foreshowing of events that I did not pick up on at all the first time around. An intelligent script, strong performances, and Frankenheimer’s confident direction mark this as a most worthwhile rediscovery from Indicator. As ever, the presentation and special features are of the highest calibre, and the inclusion of both cuts of the film is a major bonus. Warmly recommended, though it really made me want to see Providence again.