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Description:
Elegant and lush, and filmed in Venice, Rome, and rural Italy, Joseph Losey's Eva (released in the U.S. and Britain as Eve) is a cold, cruel film about crippling insecurity and sexual manipulation. Burly Stanley Baker simmers as a swaggering but self-loathing Welsh author happily indulging in the continental high life, covering up a devastating secret with braggadocio and sneering machismo; Jeanne Moreau has never been icier as the cruel, manipulative, high-rent prostitute Eve who becomes his obsession. They never become more than fascinating enigmas, but they send off sparks in an indulgently fatalistic film that wallows in human weakness and emotional self-destruction. Beautifully filmed and elegantly scored, with Billie Holiday tunes weaving a sad sense of loss through the picture, Eva became a showcase for Losey's arresting visual style and electrifying direction, and the springboard for such later, more restrained masterpieces as The Servant, Accident, and The Go-Between. The producers recut Losey's final version of the picture by 16 minutes, redubbed it, inserted lines, and changed the music (they "destroyed the rhythm and the comprehensibility of the picture," accuses Losey in an interview). The DVD includes both the release version and the 119-minute director's cut, mastered from the only surviving copy, an English-language Scandinavian print with Swedish and Finnish subtitles. It's frustrating that Kino didn't use the tools of digital technology to marry the two prints, using only the necessary footage from the subtitled version, and instead the director's cut is marred by subtitles throughout. Nonetheless, it's an important preservation of director Joseph Losey's vision. --Sean Axmaker
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