59-61 The Agitator: Three Provocations from the Wild World of Jean-Pierre Mocky

[Finch]

The Agitator: Three Provocations from the Wild World of Jean-Pierre Mocky

Jean-Pierre Mocky was a prolific icon in French cinema. Actor, director, novelist, and in-demand raconteur, Mocky made mainstream films with an independent spirit, even owning a cinema to help the distribution of his films. Yet those films had a specific style, unmistakably his, often with controversial and outlandish themes, and he came to be known as a wild and untameable force, acting as an uncompromising agitator within the French film industry for over six decades. Three of his wild cinematic adventures from the 1980s are collected in this new boxset. Cult horror sensation Litan, hooligan horror Kill the Referee and Hitchcockian mystery Agent Trouble are presented from new 4K restorations on Blu-ray for the first time outside of France.

Worried by a disturbing dream, Nora wakes to find her husband missing during a trip to Litan. She goes out to find him but encounters one bizarre event after another taking place at the village festival, including uncanny acts and a masked marching band. As Nora and Jock attempt to escape the village, a series of strange murders take place against the backdrop of a mad doctor performing experiments on the recently deceased. Jean-Pierre Mocky’s Litan is a classic cult Euro-horror and a Kafkaesque fever dream of surrealist imagery, arrestingly shot by Edmond Richard (The Trial, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie).

When a referee calls a penalty that causes a French football team to crash out of the championship, their ultra-dedicated hooligan fans vow to track him down and murder him by the end of the evening, as Inspector Granowski (played by director Jean-Pierre Mocky) attempts to stem the carnage. With an unrelenting one-night narrative recalling After Hours and Green Room, Kill the Referee mixes black humour with horror as its escalating sense of dread builds toward a shattering climax.

A bus of fifty French tourists lay dead. While the driver makes a call, a wanderer, Victorien (Tom Novembre, Denti), boards the bus and robs all the passengers. Returning home he visits his aunt Amanda (Catherine Deneuve, The Hunger), and lets her in on his secret, unwittingly bringing her to the attention of icy hitman Alex (Richard Bohringer, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover). A conspiracy thriller reminiscent of Hitchcock, Jean-Pierre Mocky’s wonderfully eccentric mystery has a light comic touch that carefully balances its grotesque flourishes. Featuring a wonderful cast including César-nominated Dominique Lavant, Pierre Arditi and Kristin Scott Thomas in only her second screen appearance.

LIMITED EDITION BOX SET SPECIAL FEATURES:

New 4K restorations of each film presented on three discs, made available on Blu-ray (1080p) for the first time outside of France
Uncompressed mono PCM audio
Archival interview with Jean-Pierre Mocky about his relationship to the fantastic (1982, 12 mins)
Archival ‘Making of Litan’ documentary from French television (1982, 26 mins)
Newly filmed interview with journalist and broadcaster Philippe Auclair on Kill the Referee (2024)
Interview with Mocky’s assistant Eric Leroy on Kill the Referee (2022, 13 mins)
Television reportage from the set of Kill the Referee (1983, 5 mins)
Archival French TV interview with Jean-Pierre Mocky (1987, 18 mins)
Archival interview with Catherine Deneuve on Agent Trouble (1987, 5 mins)
Archival interview with Richard Bohringer on Agent Trouble (1987, 5 mins)
Interview with Eric Leroy on Agent Trouble (2022, 13 mins)
Interview with Olivia Mokiejewski on Agent Trouble (2022, 4 mins)
New and improved optional English subtitles
Reversible sleeves featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow
Limited edition 80-page book featuring new writing by Roberto Curti, Nathaniel Thompson and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and newly translated archival interviews including Serge Toubiana on Jean-Pierre Mocky, and Oliver Assayas on Michel Serrault, as well as an on-set report of Kill the Referee
Limited Edition of 3000 copies, presented in a rigid box with full-height Scanavo cases and removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings
More to be confirmed and extras subject to change

trailer

[domino harvey]

I haven’t seen these but the title of the box set is quite in line with the other Mockys I have seen. Surprised they didn’t go after Le témoin, which seems 1000% up their alley (Imagine making a Chabrol film but casting Alberto Sordi in the lead and not telling him it’s not a comedy) but that film also contains one of the most misguided provocations imaginable, so maybe I’m not that surprised after all

[ryannichols7]

I'm curious to read your thoughts on these whenever you get to them. either way I like the cover art a lot and the extras seem pretty expansive...it'll be on my shelf since I subscribed!

[Finch]

Stephen Horne confirmed on the Radiance BR.com thread that they're color-correcting Litan.

[tenia]

Very good to read, though I do seem to remember all three movies would require a color correction.

[What A Disgrace]

With the Severin mystery release, and under assumption that the other films in this box are secured with either a different label or later separate US releases by Radiance, I think this is the first Radiance release I may skip. That's a pretty good run, I'd say. The only one I've purchased so far and regretted, has been The Iron Prefect. If it weren't for the big mystery Severin box, I would almost certainly have bought this.

[domino harvey]

I'm curious to read your thoughts on these whenever you get to them.

Ask and ye shall receive:

Here are the plus sides of the three films included here:
+ All three are mercifully short
+ You will be able to participate in Zardi Spotting during each one

And so let's move on to the non-pluses, shall we? These will likely not only be the first English territory home video release for Mocky, but also the last, because I find it hard to believe 3000 people will want what is being served here, much less ask for seconds. I understand from the vantage of not having seen these or other Mocky films why these might be the three you choose to release, but having now seen these plus other Mockys, a fatal error has occurred because these are not the ones to bet on, chef. For instance, I hated Snobs! but if I ran a boutique label I'd license and release it in a heartbeat because I know that a lot of people would be shocked by how astonishingly vulgar a film it is (for 1962, yes, but really for anytime) and word of mouth would carry it to more receptive audiences than me. What is the takeaway from the films Radiance is releasing in this set, other than that Mocky mostly makes movies for himself and not many share his taste?

Litan was, admittedly, doomed from the get go for me as a viewer because this is by far my least favorite kind of horror movie: the "Wacky shit happens for no reason" film. Just because Mocky ramps the nonsense up to onze doesn't mean it will overcome the fatal flaw of absolutely nothing here making sense and there being no reason to try to make meaning from so much merde.

À mort l'arbitre! is an aggressively unpleasant film, with Michel Serrault (Ironically, Mocky loves popular comic figures like Serrault, Bourvil, Francis Blanche, &c, even though his films never seem like they'd appeal to those who'd most enjoy these actors) given an extraordinarily disgusting role as the misogynistic soccer hooligan who tries to pin a murder he committed on Eddy Mitchell's ref. This film actually resembles a horror film more than Litan, but it's of the Italian garbage variety, and like many of those films, this ends with a typically pointless nihilism. Physically painful to sit through in its leaps of logic and cutesy miserablism masked as irony.

The "best" of the trio here is obviously Agent trouble, in which Mocky is given a little more money thanks to his cast (Deneuve, Bohringer, Arditi) and is thus on slightly better behavior (though even here he still can't resist an eye-rolling non-punchline like letting the nude erect penis of a rentboy pass across the frame of the screen for no reason other than to get pearls clutched-- honestly, putting Deneuve in that wig was a better provocation). The conspiracy here, miraculously, does sort of make sense in the end, but like the other films, there's a pointless fatalism to it that doesn't land on the earned hopelessness many great noirs. This is from the period when Deneuve wasn't exactly picking winners (Frequence meurtre, &c), but you'd think she could still do a better job vetting her projects than this.

And so we'll probably never see an English-friendly release of a Mocky film worth rescuing like Un drôle de paroissien, which manages to successfully marry Mocky's desire to be a provocateur with a premise that is both offensive and, crucially, actually funny (a sincerely religious man misinterprets God's will as giving him permission to rob the collection boxes of churches for his own gain), because I've given Mocky a dozen chances at this point-- how many opportunities do you think the average English-speaking consumer who has to go to great lengths to even come close is willing to give after the trio presented here?

[therewillbeblus]

That's a bummer, especially since Mocky has several films that'd be more safely marketable. Of the four I've seen, les vierges, les dragueurs and le témoin all feel like they could be strong sellers

[domino harvey]

Yes, I'd cosign all of those as being worthier releases than the films in this set. But because there's something wrong with me, I just watched yet another Mocky movie even after being so underenthused by these, and, unexpectedly, it was a masterpiece! Les Compagnons de la marguerite (1967) is proof that being a provocateur doesn't mean you can't still hit your targets with accuracy. Mocky takes on bureaucracy in this comic tale of Claude Rich's master forger who longs for someone to trade wives with him. Through a series of increasingly insane contrivances, Mocky pisses all over the modern human tendency to value a recorded fact over all else as he also mocks identity, spousal affections (never have I seen a smarter and funnier approach to the "ball and chain" attitude towards marriage), and the notions of social norms themselves. Here is a film that feels as fresh and relevant as when it was made (replace Rich's first wife-- played by his real wife! -- and her love of television with a love of smart phones and you basically have the same movie) that puckishly says that water finds its own level no matter what weight we give to our desire to follow official channels. And more disturbingly, it says we will acclimate to our situation regardless-- which is to say, the circumstances of who we are and who we are with are essentially superfluous. It's an unexpectedly utopian vision that out-libertarians any Ron Swanson's maddest fantasies of government irrelevancy, and the ideas of this film are legitimately unsettling while also being, most crucially, hilarious. If a boutique label can't restore and market a film this smart and ripe for rediscovery, it doesn't deserve to be in business

[ikms]

If it weren't for the big mystery Severin box, I would almost certainly have bought this.

Folk Horror #2, and by the time the contents are properly announced I suspect I might own half due to recommendations in the Woodlands documentary.

[kekid]

With the Severin mystery release, and under assumption that the other films in this box are secured with either a different label or later separate US releases by Radiance, I think this is the first Radiance release I may skip. That's a pretty good run, I'd say. The only one I've purchased so far and regretted, has been The Iron Prefect. If it weren't for the big mystery Severin box, I would almost certainly have bought this.

Can someone please tell us or give a link to what "Severin Mystery Release" is? thanks!

[willoneill]

I'm pretty sure it's still a mystery.