Breaking Away

It's rare for Hollywood movies to even bother selecting a setting. Most often they just take place in a generic netherworld. That's what makes "Breaking Away," the Academy Award-winning bike racing-slash-coming-of-age movie directed by Peter Yates, such a singular effort: Though it builds to a big race as its finale, Yates' film observes the town's conflicting idiosyncrasies far more often than it provides thrills or uplift.

We're in Bloomington, Indiana, where kids at the state university clash with the native burnouts and high school grads left behind. "Breaking Away" considers the conflicted split personality of this town, where the students stopping over for a few years look condescendingly down on the people who live there year after year. There's a great moment, after the film's climactic race, where Yates' camera daringly rests on one of the cutters, left alone at his moment of celebration. The plight of the college-town townie: Even at their happiest, and even at home, these kids are forgotten outsiders.

Twilight Time's Blu-ray release of the film provides the best transfer that the film has received on home video. Matthew Leonetti's cinematography accentuates the natural beauty of the town -- the water rushing below the quarries, the tree branches hanging over the well-kept bike paths -- and the disc translates it with impeccable detail. Check out the shine off the biker's helmets during the final race, or the reflections off the water during some of the swimming scenes. The visual detail here is immense, and the images are tactile.

Also included on the disc is an isolated score track (credited to Patrick Williams, though most of the score is made up of classical and operatic tracks), some trailers, a couple short featurettes, and a commentary track, where Christopher speaks with the Twilight Time team (Julie Kirgo and Nick Redmond) about his memories of the film's production, and its unexpected success.

The last extra feature included on the disc sees Christopher reminiscing about the time he spent in the company of legendary Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, on the set of one of the master's films. It may seem a relatively extraneous inclusion, but "Breaking Away" stakes a legitimate claim to the same lineage as Fellini's early films. Like "I Vitelloni" or "La Strada," Yates' film takes particular interest in classicism, aims to create an evocative and informed rendering of a very specific community, and somehow maintains a deeply romantic heart behind its socio-political commentary. Even the main character's cat is named Fellini. Only in the "New Hollywood" of the 1970s would an American film take such a cue from the art houses.

"Breaking Away"
Blu-ray
Screenarchives.com
$29.95