NOTE: The below Blu-ray and 4K UHD captures were taken directly from the respective disc.

ADDITION: Radiance 4K UHD / Blu-ray (November 2026): Radiance have transferred Walerian Borowczyk's La Margin (The Margin) to 4K UHD and Blu-ray. Shot by Borowczyk’s long-time collaborator Bernard Daillencourt, La Marge contrasts the soft, sun-dappled warmth of the country home with the saturated neon and murky interiors of nocturnal Paris, and Borowczyk’s characteristic fetishistic attention to objects - fabrics, flowers, small tokens of the lost family - is everywhere. La Marge arrives on 4K UHD from Radiance in a 2160P presentation drawn from StudioCanal’s 4K restoration. It’s SDR only, with no HDR10 or Dolby Vision, so the gains over the Blu-ray come from resolution and a hefty bitrate rather than expanded dynamic range. The UHD disc is triple-layered with a max’ed out bitrate for the 1 1/2 hour feature, over 2.5X that of the theatrical Blu-ray, and it shows. The image is framed in the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio and looks consistently film-like, with a fine, well-resolved grain structure that is never smoothed over or clumpy, even across the flat pastel backgrounds of Borowczyk’s close-ups. Colors are rich without being pushed: the red scarves and lipstick, the floral bedspreads, the mimosa-strewn sheets, and the warm amber hotel interiors with their brass sconces all carry real saturation while staying natural. Contrast is strong, with deep black levels in the nocturnal sequences and no crushing. The low-light shot of a face patterned in lace shadow holds every detail of the cast light.

Comparing to the included Theatrical Cut Blu-ray, colors and contrast are essentially a match, as expected from the same restoration. The 4K UHD’s advantage is in texture: individual strands of Dallesandro’s and Kristel’s hair, the pebbling of a leather coat, pinstripes and silk ties, lace, feathers, and the glittering thread in Kristel’s top all resolve with more precision in 4K. The Blu-ray is excellent on its own terms, dual-layered with a very high bitrate, but its grain is a touch coarser and some of that fine detail flattens out. Several of the intimate close-ups are intentionally soft and diffused on both discs; that’s Daillencourt’s photography, not a transfer weakness.

The Director’s Cut, on a separate Blu-ray, is Borowczyk’s original version of the film, running about 5 3/4 minutes longer than the producers’ theatrical cut. Rather than adding new scenes, it extends several existing ones, including Diana’s assault by her pimp, Joe in the Underground etc., and restores the original French soundtrack mix with some notably different musical cues. It is dual-layered with a slightly higher bitrate than the theatrical Blu-ray, and the restored footage shows a minor dip in quality relative to the rest of the film. Frankly, it was hardly noticeable.

Like 4K UHD transfers of The Long Wait, I, the Jury, Criterion's 2160P transfer of La Marge does not have HDR applied (no HDR10, HDR10+, nor Dolby Vision.) We have seen many other 4K UHD transfers without HDR; Mondo Macabro's Dr. Jekyll and the Werewolf, Cult Film's Django 4K UHD, Umbrella's 4K UHD transfer of Peter Weir's The Last Wave, Radiance's Palindromes, and Criterion's 4K UHD transfers of Cruel Story of Youth, I Know Where I'm Going, Charade, Captain Blood, The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain, Killer of Sheep, Chungking Express, Winchester '73, The Mother and the Whore, I Am Cuba, The Others, Rules of the Game, Branded to Kill, In the Mood For Love, Night of the Living Dead, and further examples; Masters of Cinema's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Kino's 4K UHDs of Bob le Flambeur, Last Year at Marienbad, Nostalghia, The Apartment, For a Few Dollars More, A Fistful of Dollars, In the Heat of the Night, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, as well as Koch Media's Neon Demon + one of the 4K UHD transfers of Dario Argento's Suspiria.

NOTE: We have added 56 more large resolution 4K UHD captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

Radiance lists uncompressed PCM mono, but all three discs actually carry lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 tracks. French is the original language and is 24-bit throughout. There’s also an English DUB, which is 16-bit on the 4K UHD and theatrical Blu-ray and 24-bit on the Director’s Cut disc. The original French is the way to go: dialogue is clean and clear with no hiss or dropouts. Rather than an original score, the film is built from a remarkably eclectic jukebox of pre-existing music. Mid-’70s pop dominates: Elton John’s ‘Funeral for a Friend’ and ‘Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)’, 10cc’s ‘I’m Not in Love’ and ‘Lazy Ways’, Sailor’s ‘Glass of Champagne’, and Afric Simone’s ‘Hafanana’. It sits alongside older, more melancholy Parisian sounds: Fréhel’s ‘Où est-il donc ?’, Charles Dumont’s ‘Une Femme’, Carlos Gardel’s tango ‘Yira Yira’, and Chopin’s Waltz in B minor, Op. 69, No. 2. The pop songs drift through bars, hotel rooms, and storefronts like the ambient noise of the city, while the older chansons and Chopin carry the film’s undertow of grief. The most celebrated moment is an extended use of Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ during an intimate scene between Sigimond and Diana. There the song’s slow, aching build transforms the sequence into something closer to elegy than eroticism, a perfect distillation of the film as a whole. Radiance offer optional English and English (SDH) subtitles on their Region 'B' Blu-rays and Region FREE 4K UHD.

Radiance's 4K UHD package provides strong supplements. Critic and author Samm Deighan (Hysterical Excess and Inhuman Ecstasy)contributes a new visual essay, just over 1/4 hour, that examines the morbid eroticism, surrealism, and melancholy of both Borowczyk’s film and André Pieyre de Mandiargues’ source novel. Director and cinematographer Sean Price Williams offers a new 10-minute appreciation, recalling his first encounter with La Marge and its lasting impression on him. The real treasure is Brief von Paris, a 40-minute 16mm short Borowczyk made for German broadcaster ZDF. It was shot in the French capital during the release of La Marge and makes a fascinating companion piece to the feature’s semi-documentary Paris footage. Diana from Amsterdam presents almost 6 minutes of camera operator Noël Véry’s 8mm behind-the-scenes footage, narrated by Sylvia Kristel. Portions of Véry’s home movies from the set previously appeared within the Obscure Pleasures featurette on Arrow’s Blanche Blu-ray.

Véry returns alongside assistant director André Heinrich in a 2007 interview running almost 5 minutes. Film critic and Borowczyk collaborator Noël Simsolo (Masters of Cinema: Billy Wilder) discusses his relationship with the director and how he came to be involved in the making of La Marge in an 8-minute interview from 2014. Perhaps most valuable for context is a 1/4 hour piece from French television, originally broadcast in November 1967, in which André Pieyre de Mandiargues discusses his novel shortly after it won the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Rounding things out are 11 minutes of alternate scenes taken from a VHS of The Streetwalker, the alternative British cut of the film, and an image gallery of 48 images. The limited edition of 5,000 copies comes in full-height Scanavo packaging with a removable OBI strip. It has a reversible sleeve featuring artwork based on original promotional materials and a booklet with new writing by film critic David Jenkins (Filmmakers on Film: How They Create, Craft and Communicate.)

Walerian Borowczyk (The Art of Love, Love Rites, Goto - Island of Love, "La Bête" The Beast, Private Collections, Immoral Tales, Blanche, Three Immoral Women, The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Miss Osbourne) is at his most atypical with La Marge – a mournful study of grief expressed almost entirely through the body, trading the playful provocation of his period fables for something frank, joyless, and deeply melancholy. Joe Dallesandro (Madness, Paul Morrissey's Trilogy Flesh Trash Heat, Blood for Dracula, Je t'aime moi non plus, Savage Three, Killer Nun, The Limey, Flesh for Frankenstein) brings his characteristic opacity to Sigimond, his blankness reading as numbness – a man going through the motions of desire to keep grief at bay – while Sylvia Kristel (Naked Over The Fence, Frank & Eva, Goodbye Emmanuelle, Mata Hari, Emmanuelle II, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Emmanuelle, Red Heat, The Nude Bomb, Private School) gives Diana a guarded, tired dignity far beyond the ornamental roles she was often reduced to. Set against an indifferent Paris and an extraordinary jukebox soundtrack – capped by the best use of Pink Floyd's 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' ever put on film – it is one of the director's most haunting works. The Radiance package is superb: a gorgeous, film-like SDR 4K UHD, strong Blu-rays, the exclusive Director's Cut, and a wealth of valuable supplements including Borowczyk's Brief von Paris. To the right crowd this is absolutely recommended.  

Gary Tooze