NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Kino Blu-ray (August 2021): Kino have transferred Walerian Borowczyk's Love Rites to Blu-ray. It is offers both the complete and the 13-minute shorter 'Director's Cut' of the feature seamlessly branched on the dual-layered Blu-ray. It's easy to see the vast improvement that the 1080P has over the interlaced DVDs (see below.) Indoor scenes show a lot of grain and can look greenish, but outdoor sequences are very sharp. He generally use Fuji film stock (as Bird tells us in the commentary.) I thought this had a nice heavy film-like texture but there is also depth and detail.

NOTE: We have added 50 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray, Kino use a DTS-HD Master 2.0 channel track (16-bit) in the original French language. Love Rites is the director's most talkative feature but there are still large segments without dialogue. Love Rites has the sound of the subway trains, individuals on a busy street, and the beautiful opening music of Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata, Adagio et Fugue in C major BWV 564 performed by Jean-Paul Imbert. It sounds consistent and clean in the lossless transfer. Kino offer optional English subtitles on their Region 'A' Blu-ray.

The Kino Blu-ray offers an audio commentary by Daniel Bird. Daniel belongs to the "Friends of Walerian Borowczyk" located in Paris, France - and he appears to be one of the contact email addresses. Daniel has contributed to many Borowczyk films on disc doing the commentary for Goto, Isle of Love, an introduction for Immoral Tales, an essay on Blanche, and participating in the commentary for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, among many other contributions. It's wonderful to hear him dissect the film's inner meanings. He talks about Love Rites' literal and figurative doubling, the erasing or liquidation of an identity, how parts appear Bressonian, red being an accent color in Borowczyk's work, his use of light, future planned projects and much more observing minute details that relate to the director's prevalent themes. Kino also includes Borowczyk's 1976 40-minute short Brief von Paris (Letter from Paris) described on IMDb as "Paris is a monstrously inhuman cityscape, in which cars, buses, crowds, and unceasing noise combine to smother any decent and delicate human activity. People and flowers attempt to survive in a city that seems ready to explode from an over-heated mixture of traffic and noise." It is in 1080P taking up over 7 Gig of space on the disc. There is also an 8-minute interview with Mathieu Carriere.

Walerian Borowczyk's Love Rites is another of the director's film with themes of sex and identity. I quote from Jeremy Mark Robinson's book Walerian Borowczyk: Cinema of Erotic Dreams:
"Walerian Borowczyk (known as 'Boro') is one of cinema's one-offs. Quite simply, there is no filmmaker quite like Borowczyk. Borowczyk's films have an astonishing, magical quality. They reach a place very rare in contemporary cinema, and are quite unlike the films of any other auteur. Borowczyk's films create their own space, with imagery, sounds and music of a really exceptional power."

As Eric states in the DVD comparison of Love Rites HERE, "Based on the novel "Everything Disappears" by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues (Borowcyzk's La Marge and Jack Cardiff's Girl on a Motorcycle), Love Rites is simplistic in plot yet utterly stylish in execution as one would expect from Borowczyk with festishic attention to objects, delicate lighting, and painterly composition. Like most male roles in Borowczyk's films, Carriere's performance is merely functional but he is not asked to do much; in fact, his lack of facial expression intentionally suggests a stasis of personality compared to the multi-faceted nature of Pierro's character and the obsessive attention of the camera to her face as she makes it up on the train."

The Kino Blu-ray should be very pleasing for Walerian Borowczyk fans - this, Love Rites, being his last feature. With the essential Bird commentary, both cuts, a short by the director and the Carriere interview make it a very desirable purchase for cinephiles. Absolutely recommended!

Gary Tooze

ON THE DVDs (2005): All three DVD transfers are interlaced (exhibiting heavy combing) but both the complete and director's cuts on Cult Epic's double-sided DVD feature better contrast, color, and sharpness (although a degree of the softness is certainly intentional, see The Art of Love review). The subtitles are also optional. The photo galleries on both sides are not duplicates. The gallery on the complete cut side features production stills while the one on the director's cut side features behind the scenes photographs.

The Cult Epic's transfers are PAL-converted, the native PAL Pagan DVD is not only interlaced with burnt-in subtitles but it runs shorter than the director's cut on the Cult Epics disc (although the Pagan disc was passed with no cuts by the BBFC). Neither disc is a great representation of the film but the Cult Epics' release has two cuts of the film and better color. All three transfers are non-anamorphic and their matting could be described as hard-matted without new video mattes (flare sometimes bleeds over the mattes). The Pagan edition has been reissued in the UK (with a nicer cover) by Hanzibar Films.

- Eric Cotenas