Thursday 21 May 2020

That Most Important Thing: Love (1975)



Director: Andrzej Żuławski
Screenplay: Andrzej Żuławski and Christopher Frank
Based on a novel by Christopher Frank
Cast: Romy Schneider as Nadine Chevalier; Fabio Testi as Servais Mont; Jacques Dutronc as Jacques Chevalier; Claude Dauphin as Mazelli; Roger Blin as Le père de Servais; Gabrielle Doulcet as Madame Mazelli; Michel Robin as Raymond Lapade; Guy Mairesse as Laurent Messala; Katia Tchenko as Myriam; Nicoletta Machiavelli as Luce; Klaus Kinski as Karl-Heinz Zimmer

Warning - Major Plot Spoilers

That Most Important Thing: Love comes in a very important point in Andrzej Żuławski's career, his first film in exile from his native Poland. The Devil (1972) had been banned under communist era authority of Poland, and whilst he would return in the late seventies, that would lead to On the Silver Globe, which would only get a release in 1988 because notoriously this adaptation of his granduncle's pioneering science fiction novel was shut down by authorities mid way through its making, believing it had subversive messaging. That film would only be completed with Zulawski himself narrating the missing pieces between surviving footage and filming modern scenes of ordinary members of the public in a city. He would make many films outside his country of origin as a result, only returning to Poland in his cinema in Szamanka (1996), long after the Iron Curtain fell.

Out of the Żuławski films I have seen, this is very easy to follow, a love story but a very tragic one as it is a doomed romantic triangle between an actress Nadine Chevalier (Romy Schneider) stuck in making sex films to survive, a photographer Servais Mont (Fabio Testi) who is obsessed with her, and her husband Jacques Chevalier (Jacques Dutronc), a guy whose life is to just buy film memorabilia (mostly photos) and cinephilia, but is visibly aware his wife is falling in love with Servais. Love does finally succeed, but it is a painful and agonising route towards it. Żuławski, even when he made a comedy in his last film Cosmos (2015), demands the fullest spectrum of emotion and this is the same. Servais works in the fringes, in debt to a shady elderly mob boss, paying back his debt through under-the-counter pornographic photo sessions, sneaking in the midst of one of Nadine's films in the first scene, being bullied by her female director into acting out a sex scene with a corpse. He tries to help her out of this mess, by pulling strings with a friend, a chronic alcoholic, and getting her into a production of Richard III. Unfortunately, when you see the production, where infamous German actor Klaus Kinski is playing the lead actor Karl-Heinz Zimmer in full samurai armour howling his lines like a maniac, it is clear the stage production is not going to work for anyone. Servais will be in debt, Nadine will be going nowhere in her life, and Jacques will feel both the tragic outsider but also glad, unable to fulfil his wife's sexual and emotional needs, feeling himself trapped in the midst of this.

Oh, and yes, Klaus Kinski in samurai armour is a reminder that this is still a Żuławski production, as whilst this is not as delirious as other films of his for me, narratively driven to the point I do not consider it "abstract" as any of the others, it is still a frenzied experience that is yet structured between sombre and haunting emotional drama. He has always walked a dangerous tightrope between the absurd and the profound, and this is a significant case study of this risk at hand. Already in the first few scenes, you have a staged necrophilia scene that is not working, Servais getting into a fistfight with production crew, gangsters out of a cartoon and a hyper-intense acting style which is interjected with moments of stillness.

Kinski does not even appear until part of the way through, and of all things, for the man notorious for his work with his fellow countryman Werner Herzog, he is the most restraint figure in the cast. He still beats two men up, for one touching his coat, out of the angst of having his performance on stage damned in a review, taking the two women they were with back home to sleep with, but the film unlike the madness of anything between the films before this or to Cosmos is so much subdued in comparison to Żuławski's other work. Even in a film which will violent cut to a sex orgy with very explicit nudity, like this has turned into a European softcore film from the period, the film frames it from a very emotional aspect of Servais being stuck having to photograph this material. Likewise, Kinski's Karl-Heinz, an actor from a wealthy background who takes a charm to Nadine and even tries to help her through the stage rehearsals, is for the most part the most sympathetic figure in opposite to Kinski's real life persona. Their stage director, who decks himself out in ridiculous costumes and is mashing very eras of iconography into his Shakespeare production however is definitely one of the weirdest aspects of the film, and the doomed nature of the production is painted as being inevitable the moment you first encounter him dishevelled on the floor of Karl-Heinz's hotel.


What differs Love from the Żuławski's films I have seen are a couple of factors. Here, he had camera operator/cinematographer Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz follow him from Poland, the man responsible for the director's trademark prowling camera scenes as Jaroszewicz would literally run with the camera handheld in work like The Devil. However, the main cinematographer for Love is Ricardo Aronovich1. Whilst Żuławski's trademark of the prowling camera is here, here it is contrasted by many still scenes, generating melancholia. The look of the film as well, with its muted colours, emphasises a palpable sadness to the story, co-written by Christopher Frank, and for all the outer film's peculiar nature, it is also deeply heartbreaking.

The film ends with the likelihood of Nadine and Servais finally being together, but it is only possible because Jacques kills himself to avoid being a barrier between them, taking rat poison in a public bathroom. Whilst he has had his dark moments, mocking Nadine for working in porn but also being prudish at a dinner with his cineaste friends, Jacques comes off as a clownish young boy in a man's body, obsessed with classic Hollywood and literally a clown at one point, actor Jacques Dutronc shuffling along in many scenes like a stereotypical penguin. He is sad to see as someone clearly meant to be pushed to the side and knowing this, and even between Nadine and Servais, the film ends with Servais beaten to a pulp in the finale scene.

It is fascinating as a transition for Żuławski, working outside of Poland (and mainly in France) for a large part of his career, much of the later work likewise being heavily reliant on emotion. Those later films could be extremer in their tone and content, such as the next film he was able to finish, a work by the name of Possession (1981) that has made his reputation by itself for good reason. Of note is that even that film stems from heartbreaking emotion, more so it was directly channelling a divorce from his wife, whilst even the absurd and funny Cosmos follows a plot point with a male character committing suicide. Even if it is by way of grotesqueness, be it big cartoonish body builders with muscles like cannon balls or how decrepit the mafia boss' entourage can be, the heart is still here in Love in-between all this absurdness.

I have not even talked about Romy Schneider, but befittingly she should have the last paragraph. Fabio Testi, Kinski et al are memorable and do an incredible job in their roles, but That Most Important Thing: Love is her film. Whilst there are clear compromises for her (mainly that nudity is obscured when other scenes with other actors are exceptionally explicit), the legendary actress does absorb the tone of Żuławski's acting style of letting the emotions possess her. She won her first César Award (France's equivalent of the Oscar) for this film, and from anger to passion, she makes every change completely believable. It is quite shocking, and sad, to realise she passed only in her early forties in 1982, only seven years from this production, a startling moment of fate that is sobering1. We can thankfully look to a film like this, where she is the centre of the film and its heart, and find that it was the right way to end any review of Love by talking about her performance.

Abstract Spectrum: Bizarre/Grotesque/Manic/Melancholic
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None


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1) If confirmable, one of the oddest connections to my taste in cinema is that Ricardo Aronovich was the cinematographer on Christmas Evil (1980), which in spite of that dull title is a Christmas horror film that is mostly a psychological drama. It is a very strange discovery to find.

2) Even Jean-Luc Godard in his obscure TV movie for a TV series, Rise And Fall Of A Small Film Company (1986), remarks of this himself in a small cameo, felt with a huge melancholy as part of many things of how the French film industry was felt to have changed for the worst. I think we can say that even if it influenced one of Godard's experimental productions, the effect of Schneider's passing was significant.

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