Tattoo (1981) DVD

I saw this film years ago on VHS, and found it pretty stunning and powerful. With its downbeat tone and controversial subject matter it really belongs more to the 70s than the 80s - I'd group it with Maniac, Cruising and Southern Comfort, although as the story unfolds it starts to develop a surreal, obsessive vibe that is all its own. In the end, with its Japanese cultural undercurrent and the way the central obsession overwhelms the narrative, it started to remind me of In the Realm of the Senses. Sadly nobody has (yet) seen fit to track down the camera negative and create a proper remastered widescreen edition, but this version does pretty well. The original print is pretty much damage-free, and the audio crisp enough to remind me how beautiful and heartbreaking Barry deVorzon's score is. Image quality is vastly better than VHS, it's just a shame it's a 4:3 crop - the film really needs to be seen in 1.85:1 to appreciate the cinematography by Arthur Ornitz, which I can only describe as painterly. So, a film definitely not for everybody, but very much a hidden, under-appreciated gem, and I'm glad it has at least some availability on disk.