SYNOPSIS

One of the late director Radley Metzger’s best-known works that never received a proper restoration in his lifetime – a modernist, time-traveling cinematic take on Violette Leduc’s 1955 novel (which, itself, was not published uncensored for nearly 50 years), the story of two schoolgirls whose friendship transforms into a powerful affair.

Essy Persson’s Therese is unceremoniously dumped at a prestigious boarding school, so that her mother and hated stepfather can seek their own pleasures, where she meets the precocious Isabelle (a perhaps too-old-for-the-role Anna Gael). What follows is the first flowering of sapphic love, gorgeously lensed in black and white Panavision with a lush George Auric score, described by Eric Henderson as “a portrait of lesbian romantic bliss that’s refreshingly indifferent to the context of patriarchy.”

Called by Richard Corliss “the first sexploitation film that is almost too good to be a sexploitation film. It is serious, even sober; it has a meticulously schemed mise-en-scéne… and in a dangerously ethereal way, it’s dirty”; Therese and Isabelle has been restored in the French language version preferred by the director, yet rarely screened.

THE RESTORATIONISTS:

The filmography of erotic art-house master Radley Metzger (1929-2017) has long been subject to poor video quality distribution. For a director whose eye for cinematic detail and creative use of widescreen formats was acute, he didn’t seem to have much interest in quality control when releasing his works on home video during his lifetime. While late-period Blu-ray masters of some of his better known films could be decent enough, one of his titles which never received a quality release was one of his masterpieces, Therese and Isabelle.

A lushly-photographed erotic work, shot in Panavision with rich architectural detail in French exteriors and interiors, the film existed for decades only in murky, poorly-framed standard definition video transfers, and few if any 35mm prints are known to still exist. When byNWR rescued the entirety of the Metzger film archive on its way to the (literal) dumpster, we were relieved to find that Metzger had kept virtually every one of his films’ original negatives, making sure they were returned to him after film labs had done their work.

But in the case of Therese and Isabelle, the popularity of the film led to it being re-printed multiple times, and unfortunately its original 35mm camera negative had endured plenty of mishandling and abuse. Several sections of the negative had been lost or removed, replaced with dupe material of lesser image quality, and much of it was caked with embedded dust and dirt from poor storage.

The Restorationists spent many hours hand-painting out splice marks, dust particles and torn frames. It was discovered that several scenes suffered from jitter and instability, likely from issues in the 35mm camera, and these were stabilized with digital tools.

Perhaps most crucially, the film has been restored to its French language version and given re-translated English subtitles. Metzger long preferred the French version – though both French and English were spoken on set, and all versions of the films were dubbed into either French or English. The fact that Metzger preferred the French makes his decision to keep only the English-dubbed version in release, then, a puzzler… but this writer’s guess is that he was thinking about the box office bottom line of the 1960s, when the vast majority of films imported into the U.S. appeared in dubbed versions (including, of course, virtually all of his own Audubon Films distribution imports – Metzger would oversee the English dubbing of all of them for an American audience). Indeed, the French-language version of the film had been struck from a duplicate positive, so only ever existed in a visually compromised state.

Here, then, for the first time, viewers may watch it in either language, with or without subtitles, and fully restored from the surviving 35mm negative to the best presentation of the film in nearly 60 years.

– Peter Conheim, Cinema Preservation Alliance

TECHNICAL SUMMARY:

This new 4K digital restoration of Therese and Isabelle was preserved from the extant sections of 35mm original camera negative and duplicate composite negative, and French language original optical soundtrack negative. This restoration represents the first time that high quality, original picture elements have been utilized for its French language release version.

Produced by Nicolas Winding Refn/byNWR (DK) and Cinema Preservation Alliance (USA).

Picture and track restoration and mastering – Peter Conheim

Colorist – Andrew Drapkin

35mm picture capture –  Spracklen Film and Video

Audio track capture – Audio Mechanics

CAST:

Essy Persson – Therese

Anna Gael – Isabelle

Barbara Laage – Therese’s mother

Anne Vernon – Mademoiselle le Blanc

Simone Paris – The Madame

Maurice Teynac – Monsieur Martin

Rémy Longa – Pierre

RADLEY METZGER

Radley Metzger (1929-2017) began his career as an editor and dubber of imported films before co-directing his first effort, the shoestring-made Dark Odyssey (1961). As the co-founder of Audubon Films, he imported European-made titles for American distribution, finding his niche as a purveyor of sexy “art-house” films with an eye towards intelligence and thoughtfulness, before returning to the camera and beginning a cycle of provocative and elegant work. The successes of Carmen, Baby (1967) and Therese and Isabelle (1968) led to the increasingly sophisticated trio of Camille 2000 (1969), The Lickerish Quartet (1970) and Score (1973) before moving into hard-core territory in the ensuing decades.

RADLEY METZGER FILMOGRAPHY:

1984 The Princess and the Call Girl
1983 Aphrodesia’s Diary (uncredited)
1981 World of Henry Paris
1981 The Tale of Tiffany Lust (uncredited)
1978 The Cat and the Canary
1977 Maraschino Cherry
1977 Barbara Broadcast
1976 The Opening of Misty Beethoven

1975 The Image
1975 Naked Came the Stranger
1974 The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann
1973 Score
1973 Little Mother aka Woman of the Year
1970 The Lickerish Quartet
1969 Camille 2000
1968 Therese and Isabelle
1967 Carmen, Baby
1966 The Alley Cats
1965 The Dirty Girls
1964 Dictionary of Sex
1961 Dark Odyssey

Peter Conheim is a freelance film and media restorationist and musician living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s overseen the rescue of such notable films as SPRING NIGHT SUMMER NIGHT (1968), NIGHT TIDE (1963), LUMINOUS PROCURESS (1971) and legendary psychologist Stanley Milgram’s filmed record of his experiments, OBEDIENCE (1965).

He is the lead archivist behind the streaming “culture ‘zine” byNWR.com, for which he has restored some 30-plus feature films from original 35mm and 16mm source materials through his film preservation non-profit, Cinema Preservation Alliance. As musician and performer, he is A co-founder of Mono Pause and Wet Gate, a former member of culture jammers Negativland, and performs alongside Malcolm Mooney of CAN.