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
============
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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