178 Solo

[Finch]

A womanising violinist and jewel thief (Jean-Pierre Mocky, Litan) must abandon his carefree lifestyle when he learns that his younger brother is part of the leftist revolutionary group responsible for the brutal murders of powerful men. Determined to save the life of his idealistic sibling, the cynical drifter becomes embroiled in a struggle that is not his to fight. A decade after appearing in La tête contre les murs, Jean-Pierre Mocky returned to acting with this profoundly satirical crime drama. Unflinching and heavily influenced by American cinema, Solo captures the visceral feeling of disillusionment of a post-1968 French society brimming with rage at the sinister powers that be.

BLU-RAY LIMITED EDITION SPECIAL FEATURES

4K restoration by Éclair Classics supervised by Mocky Delicious Products
2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio
Archival interview with screenwriter and star Jean-Pierre Mocky (2018, 12 mins)
Interview with actor Anne Deleuze (2022, 16 mins)
Interview with Jean-Pierre Mocky’s assistant and friend Eric Le Roy (2022)
Trailer
Optional English subtitles
Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters
Limited edition booklet featuring archival interviews with Mocky
Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

[tenia]

I'm seeing the Solo reviews popping up, and I'm surprised Radiance didn't re-garde the whole thing like they did for other movies which had an obvious lab color signature. This one is quite bad, and it was amongst those who definitely would have needed it.

[nicolas]

I'm surprised as well but it seems Radiance has a new technical producer (Niall Glynn) according to this month's booklets. It used to be Stephen C. Horne, who did the re-grades of problematic masters as well as their in-house grades.

[CSM126]

I do find it funny that the criticism I’ve seen the most is that it’s too yellow - unless you ask blu-ray.com, who said it’s too blue. Those folks are always out there in left field.

[tenia]

They're not wrong, per se. Ritrovata's usual color signature is covering the colors with a pale yellowish veil. You can see that's not the case here with Solo. It's because it's from Eclair, and Eclair tends to color-sign rather towards steely blues, which would make yellow turn greenish. When I look at Chris' captures, what's revealing is how speculars and shadows are handled, because they indeed all get blue overcasts. You have this on the 2nd cap on the violin, the blacks are all rather blue (or "duck green") on the 5th, 9th and 10th caps, the white fabric had blue underlays on the 7th cap, and every grey fabric (jacket, hat, curtain) turns teal (hat on cap 3, jacket in the background on cap 15, curtain on caps 19 and 21).

And though it doesn't particularly shows in Chris' cap, the counter-effect is that saturated yellows are also affected by this, like the barrels on cap 4, or the lights on cap 22 (or the water pot on blu-ray.com's 2nd cap).

But obviously, the white balance is all over the place anyway, and I'm not surprised one could spontaneously be bothered by all this sick yellow everywhere. However, this is what sets Eclair's color signature from Ritrovata's, in a way that no one can be mistaken from where Solo has been graded.