Ladyhawke is a baffling film. It begins with Matthew Broderick’s scamp of a thief, Philippe Gaston, worming his way through the mud walls of a prison’s bowels to escape into a sewer, and it truly settles on a plot when he stumbles across two shapeshifting lovers doomed to never spend time with each other as humans. Though the focus should be on Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer’s cursed couple, their story is filtered through the intrusion of Broderick, then at the peak of his ‘80s nerd heartthrob popularity. The young actor brings his mildly sardonic charisma to the part of Philippe, commenting on the action with “why me?” exasperation and manic confusion at the circumstances of his life, creating a mood that conflicts with the intended tragedy of the romance he witnesses.
Fans of Richard Donner’s Superman films place them in contrast to Richard Lester’s debilitatingly comic take on the character, and at times, Ladyhawke seems to mark another case where Lester usurped Donner during a Warner Bros production and muddled a more winsomely classical sense of adventure with ill-fitting irony. It’s nearly impossible to get a read on this film, where technical skill regularly rubs up against carelessness. The Italian countryside and still-standing castles are filmed with loving beauty, using color filters to create soft pulses of lavender skies and pale blue soil. Light doesn’t pour through windows so much as it pores in, seeping through the rippled holes of keeps and cathedrals until it infuses each space’s bloodstream. By the same token, so many of the props look so amateurish they border on silent-era cheesiness, especially the way that actual metal swords are filmed so clumsily, all reflective surfaces and clumsy design, that they resemble cardboard wrapped in foil.
Part of the neo-medieval streak of ‘80s films that included the likes of Dragonslayer and Legend, Ladyhawke even shares the incongruously modern soundtracking of the latter, in this case a mixture of prog rock, Gregorian chants, and synthesizer music that seems entirely unrelated to the emotional tenor of any scene. (At least Legend had the Jerry Goldsmith score as a backup.) The film’s strongest moments are those where either Hauer or Pfeiffer has to wake up to another day or night with their loved one nearby only in the form of a beast, each of them etching a lifetime of despair onto their faces while rarely vocalizing their pain. With a better soundtrack and a sharper focus on these characters, Ladyhawke might have been one of the stronger works of the often tedious fantasy boom of the decade, but as it stands, its trendiness stands as one of the more demonstrative displays of why so many of those movies were terrible.
A/V
The delicate beauty of Ladyhawke is well-preserved by Warner Archive’s Blu-ray. Vittorio Storaro’s typically divine cinematography retains all the subtleties of its fantastical textures and colors, and if at times the tricolor bands of each frame look like improperly calibrated three-strip Technicolor, the contrast of those shades gives the film much of its visual character. Sound is also clear and well-mixed, even if that dumb soundtrack often threatens to drown out everything else when it comes on.
Extras
Warner Archive has put more bonuses on their Blu-rays than their DVD-Rs, but this Blu-ray comes only with a theatrical trailer.
Overall
Richard Donner’s strange, instantly dated revisionist fantasy offers scattered charms, but Warner Archive nonetheless treat it well with a great A/V transfer that highlights the film’s strongest attrbutes.
