paratext

La Femme Publique. 3/16 at Cinefamily. This movie has the best naked dance scenes ever put to film. 

A rare film about filmmaking that’s fleshy as it is brainy, La Femme Publique is an eloquently effed love letter to cinema that could have only been created by a director for whom romance is synonymous with delirium. A physically stunning Valérie Kaprisky stars as an aspiring actress whose efforts in a wild film adaptation of Dostoevsky keep her (barely) sane amongst the literal grind of nude photography dancing(!). Long drawn to the cinematic concept of doubles, Zulawski casts one for himself here, in the guise of the expat director (an intense Francis Huster) who shares Zulawski’s own obsession for extracting extreme, unorthodox performances from the cast. As Huster directs Kaprisky both on and off the set (and into his bedroom), his production remains one of cinema’s most self-reflexive and most aggressive films-within-a-film, viscerally exploding the boundaries between performance and life, and between director and directed. An essential companion piece to The Important Thing is to Love, this is required viewing for anyone looking for insight into the creative mind of one of the 20th century’s most inventive auteurs.

Impossibly funneling all of Zulawski’s violent, expansive energy into the delicate, cramped indoor spaces of the heart and well-furnished Parisian apartments, The Important Thing Is To Love charts a precarious, slow-burning love triangle between an actress-turned-porn starlet (Romy Schneider, in a career-defining performance), her jester-like husband (pop star Jacques Dutronc), and an admiring photographer (Fabio Testi) that explores the tension between passion and duty, as well as art and trash. Here, Zulawski is at his most rigorously restrained, mirroring the unconsummated smoldering between the luminous Schneider and moody Testi, a relationship unfazed through a sensualist hailstorm of grandiose orgies, pet bats, morose clowns, loan sharks, and geriatric drug addicts. As if that’s not enough, Klaus Kinski himself plays an overly intense thespian with a hair-trigger anger problem, thanks to one of history’s most awesomely self-aware casting choices. A tremendous Euro arthouse smash upon its release in the mid-’70s, The Important Thing Is To Love is not only essential Zulawski viewing, but essential viewing period.

Hitting an off-the-charts level of subversive allegory, Zulawski’s second feature is a blood-splattered rampage through a war-charred 1790s Poland that turns the historical epic inside out, and dances on its carcass. Immediately banned in the director’s Communist Poland for over a decade and a half, The Devil writhes with nonstop demonic energy as it follows an nobleman who, after escaping from prison, swandives into insanity and mass murder. Returning home to his once-rich family — one now reduced to savages — and manipulated by a black-cloaked Satanic stranger at the center of a web of political treachery, the nobleman eventually enacts a Hamlet-like pyrrhic revenge on just about everyone in sight. But The Devil’s most spectacularly intense violence is all emotional, with near-constant outbursts of grief, and desperation of a seizure-like intensity that is downright mesmerizing. You won’t be able to look away, and with the way Zulawski’s gloriously restless camerawork captures all the detail, you’ll never want to.

http://www.cinefamily.org/films/the-unbelievable-genius-of-andrzej-zulawski/#the-devil

Oh damn, in March there’s going to be a retrospective of Polish director Andrzej Zulawski’s films, which are, in brief, totally batshit crazy. Here’s the blurb for his debut film, The Third Part of the Night, which is one of my favorites. 

Emerging right out of the gate with a debut as emotionally potent and stylistically inventive as any of his dazzling later works, Andrzej Zulawski’s masterful fever dream The Third Part of the Night is a elliptical wonder on par with the most mind-stretching intellectual Moebius strips of Tarkovsky and David Lynch. Based on the real-life experiences of Zulawski’s father during the Nazi occupation of Poland, the film follows a fugitive who, after witnessing the murder of his wife and child, is hurled into a life that literally is not his own. Littered with trapdoors, doubles, and wormholes, Zulawski creates a cinematic world on the verge of collapse, where doppelgangers and dread abound alongside the true untold story of a Nazi vaccine laboratory, where Jews and members of the resistance were “employed” as feeders for parasites infected with typhus (thus protecting them from persecution.) It’s a history that’s mind-bogglingly fascinating on its own; in Zulawski’s hands, it’s one of the most unique war films ever created.