JOANNA Blu-ray Review

BFI:

Seventeen-year-old Joanna is cool, stylish, and determined to start a new life as an art student in swinging London. Played with gusto by Genevieve Waite, Joanna indulges in the pleasures of casual sexual encounters, colourful daydreams, and an impromptu trip to Morocco with the wise and debonair Lord Peter Sanderson (wonderfully played by Donald Sutherland). But when Joanna falls in love with Gordon, from Sierra Leone, her life begins to get complicated.

I loved Joanna!  I'm a big fan of British youth films from the 1960's, and this is one that I had never seen nor heard of prior to its inclusion in the BFI's Flipside line-up.  The film follows Joanna, a free-spirited, sexually liberated young girl making her way through London.  She moves from man to man and lives her life the way she sees fit.  It is actually a very progressive film, and one that probably wouldn't be made today, simply because of that liberation and the consequences a modern film would have to show.

Joanna's life is unfettered by obligation.  Nominally she is in London to attend the Royal College of Art, however, it becomes clear early on that this is only a pretense to get her to the big city and out on her own.  She is perpetually missing classes after having stayed out too late and slept in too long.  The adventures she has along the way are always fun, and sometimes informative.  When meeting up with an ex-lover/artist named Cas, she comes across his latest conquest named Beryl, who shares a sensibility with Joanna and they become fast friends.  Through Beryl, Joanna finds that her life, which had been mostly lived on the spur of the moment, could be something more without losing the sense of spontaneity she craved.

Soon, Joanna meets up with Beryl's main squeeze, a British lord played to foppish perfection by a young Donald Sutherland.  Sutherland's Lord Sanderson teaches them all a lot about life, and takes them both, along with Joanna's current fling, to Morocco for a holiday.  While there, Joanna and Lord Sanderson bond in a platonic, but very meaningful way, and she learns a lot from him about how to truly live.

All of this is done is a very stylistically bravura manner by director Michael Sarne (Myra Breckenridge), who pulls no punches with his first feature film. The direction of the film is most definitely one of its greatest strengths.  The pop-art inspired, non-linear editing and frequent fantasy sequences do more to help the audience understand Joanna as a character than any number of monologues might. It is just fabulously made, and it is a shame that it isn't as well known as its contemporaries like Bedazzled and Alfie (which was the film Sarne referenced when pitching the film to the studio), because Joanna has much the same charm and attitude of those brilliant films.

I only wish that Michael Sarne had a larger oeuvre to explore.  Beyond Joanna and Myra Breckenridge there isn't much to look at.  Sarne also had a successful career as a pop singer and worked in television for a bit, but those two films will forever stand as a monument to a great talent that could've created a lifetime of wonderful films.

The Disc:

The BFI Flipside Blu-ray/DVD of Joanna is very, very good.  Due to limitations of the source material, the Blu-ray image isn't perfect, though.  There are number small defects and a few small scratches in the print that haven't been fixed.  However, in my opinion, in the war between digital restoration and the integrity of the original image, integrity will almost always win out.  Such is the case here.  The image looks very good.  There is grain where there should be, the colors are bright and punchy, and there is lots of good, solid, HD detail to be seen.  Overall a very good presentation, if not perfect.

The audio is similarly good.  BFI have provided a PCM mono audio track that does exactly what it is supposed to.  The dialogue is clear, the music is clear, and every sound effect is precisely rendered and effective. The A/V presentation is commendable.  Who would have thought that these films would ever be on Blu-ray so soon, let alone in such good shape?

One of the things that these BFI Flipside discs do best is to contextualize the film with appropriate extras, short films, and essays to help the viewer understand why they've been chosen and where they've come from.  Joanna is no exception.  Included are Michael Sarne's directorial debut Road to Saint Tropez, a travelogue starring a very young Udo Kier in his onscreen debut.  This film is a lot of fun.  Kier plays a gigolo escorting a bored woman along France's Cote d'azur. Much of Sarne's directorial style is on display here, with experimentation using different filters and editing styles that definitely find a home in Joanna.  Also present is a short film titled Death May Be Your Santa Claus, which is an exploration of interracial relationships in the UK in the 60's.  Also included but not available for review are a 15 minute interview of Michael Sarne and a PDF version of Sarne's novelization of Joanna on a separate DVD which also houses all of the above features along with the film.

Here again, I will profess my love for a good booklet.  BFI is right up there with Master of Cinema and The Criterion Collection when it comes to providing these essays and interviews.  The booklet for Joanna is packed with critical writing about Joanna and the short films, as well as biographical material about Michael Sarne and a contemporary review of Joanna from 1968.  Really outstanding stuff, and well worth owning.  BFI Flipside's Joanna Blu-ray/DVD is highly recommended!

BFI Flipside's Joanna is presented on Blu-ray in region B only, so buyer beware.