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Innocence
Anyone who has truly loved someone will find that Innocence strikes a chord in its gentle evocation of genuine, lasting love... and loss. The film opens with what we learn is a flashback of more than forty years, as Andreas (Charles Tingwell) writes a letter to the woman he loved (and lost) all those years ago. When Claire (Julia Blake) answers, and agrees to rekindle their acquaintanceship, neither is quite prepared for the fact that their love has indeed weathered the passing years largely unchanged.
Innocence takes the story of "lovers reunited after a long time apart" and drives it to its farthest extreme. How long can a pair of lovers be apart and still find the old flame intact? What happens to a person's emotional life in the gradual transition from youth to old age? Whereas the typical conception of old age is of the "twilight of one's years," when passions fade and memories of times past becomes more and more important, Innocence challenges us to see old age as a condition of the body, not of the spirit. The protagonists themselves struggle with the issues that the sudden re-ignition of their romance has brought up, but it's unquestionable that they are living their lives fully regardless of how many years they have left.
After endless instances of Hollywoodian ideas of the December-May romance, in which a character of Andreas' age inevitably is matched with a love interest in her twenties or thirties, it's a distinct pleasure to see the match between Charles Tingwell and Julia Blake: it's all the more affecting because it's realistic and ordinary rather than glamorous. In Andreas and Claire we are shown both ends of the spectrum: youthful passion and enduring adult love, with the message implied that genuine love is a lasting as well as a beautiful thing.
Innocence has some interesting material to work with, but it does seem curiously pigheaded in its focus on only one part of the story. The central axis of the movie is the forty-year gap between the young lovers' last parting and their re-acquaintance; everything hinges on those lost decades and what their loss has meant to the characters. For me, the central mystery was what had happened: why did they part, why did they fail to reunite, and under what circumstances? It's all the more interesting because there's apparently neither surprise nor rancor at their meeting years later; if there's any bitterness about having parted, it must have faded away long before. But apart from a few intriguing, quasi-surrealistic memory-images of their love affair and parting as young adults, the story never touches on that gap. I suspect that director Paul Cox was trying to keep the film focused on the emotional lives of the characters in their later years, but to evade the entire mystery of what happened is like promising someone a full dinner and then reneging on dessert: even though the rest was enjoyable, something feels like it's missing. But in a sense, it's also a virtue of the film that it's not predictable, either in its overall structure or in the way the story develops.
The DVD
Video
Innocence is burdened with a truly terrible transfer... but it's not terrible in the way that DVD transfers usually are. It's presented in its original 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio, and is anamorphically enhanced. The print is clean, with no noise to be seen anywhere, and no print flaws; the colors are bright and generally natural-looking, and contrast is adequate. So where does Innocence go wrong?
The anamorphic transfer that we get on the DVD appears to have been resampled from a lower-resolution original image, which was probably a non-anamorphic transfer of the film. If this is the case, it would have been a very foolish thing to do, as it's a guarantee of a degraded image, but it's the only way I can think of to explain the result, which is an image that's loaded with distracting sampling artifacts. In general, the image is extremely blurry, to the point, for instance, that faces beyond the close-up range are represented by amorphous blobs with only vaguely suggested features. It's actually quite unpleasant to watch, since it's clear that we should be able to recognize the character, but it's impossible to do so until the camera moves closer.
On top of the sampling issues, the film has been absolutely loaded to the gills with edge enhancement. Edge enhancement is often used to in an attempt to "improve" the image quality of low-resolution transfers; I'm never in favor of its usage as it actually decreases clarity rather than increasing it, and in the case of Innocence it's like throwing fuel on the fire, producing multiple-layered haloes all over the place and reducing detail even further.
Audio
If only the video quality of Innocence were as good as its audio quality... The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack is really very good, especially considering that it's a mainly dialogue-based film. The actors' voices are nicely clear and clean, and the surround channels are used throughout the film for small but effective immersive touches.
A Dolby 2.0 French soundtrack is also provided, along with English, French, and Spanish subtitles.
Extras
Trailers are the only special feature for this film. On the plus side, the menus are straightforward and easy to use.
Final thoughts
I find it ironic that the cover art for Innocence puts the youthful kiss of Andreas and Claire as the central focus, with the chaste figures of them in later life set much smaller, in the background, when the focus of the film is squarely on their romance in old age. Is the public not ready to accept a romance film advertised by a kiss between a man and a woman in their seventies? Even though I found that it didn't develop the material as fully as I would have liked, Innocence creates a memorable character-driven film by focusing on the emotional life of adults "acting like grownups," to use a phrase from the film. Innocence would have gotten a "recommended" rating if it weren't for the sorry state of its DVD transfer, which leads me to recommend it as a rental.
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