Daughters of Darkness: Episode 7

The latest episode of the podcast I co-host, Daughters of Darkness, is now up over at Diabolique.

From the site (which is also where you can download it):

In the seventh episode of Daughters of Darkness, Kat and Samm conclude their four-part exploration of the career of director Andrzej Zuławski, beginning with a discussion of La note bleue (1991). This unconventional biographical drama explores the fading relationship between Chopin and French writer George Sand, which is complicated by the intrusion of her teenage daughter, Solange (played by Zuławski’s then partner and longtime muse Sophie Marceau), who is also in love with Chopin.

Next they look at Zuławski’s first Polish-made film in nearly two decades, the strange and sublime Szamanka (1996), about an uncontrollable young woman whose sexual relationship with an anthropologist begins to consume his life. Finally, they explore La fidélité (2000), his final film with Marceau, which follows a headstrong artist and her difficult, but passionate marriage to a book publisher that is thrown into chaos when an attractive young photographer enters her life. They wrap up the episode with a discussion of Zuławski’s recent, final film, Cosmos (2015), an absolutely beautiful adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz’s absurdist novel of the same name, about two young men who discover an existential mystery at a boarding house in the countryside.

MES NUITS SONT PLUS BELLES QUE VOS JOURS (1989) aka MY NIGHTS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN YOUR DAYS

Effusively romantic and yet profoundly melancholic, Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1989) is Żuławski’s almost perversely cerebral take on love — much of the central relationship unfolds through language games and wordplay — though it also contains some of the director’s most erotic sex scenes. Out of all his other works, this is perhaps the most similar to his first French film, L’important c’est d’aimer (1975) — which also featured French pop singer Jacques Dutronc in a starring role — and both appear to be straightforward romantic dramas about the developing relationship of a seemingly ill-matched couple. But Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours is so much more; at once lyrical and maddening, its themes of mortality, love, language, and trauma result in one of Żuławski’s most difficult to define, poetic films.

A brilliant computer programmer who has recently created a new language, Lucas (Dutronc), is informed that he has a mysterious terminal disease, one that will rapidly attack the language center of his brain and cause him to lose his memory before killing him. Thanks to a chance meeting at a café, he falls in love with the much younger, troubled Blanche (Sophie Marceau), who has had some recent success with a traveling nightclub act as a psychic. He follows her to a seaside resort, determined to give their relationship a chance despite their numerous personal obstacles and the memories of trauma that haunt them both.

The single element that makes the film so unusual — and, in a way, inaccessible — is the near constant manipulation of language and particularly the use of paronomasia that began with Żuławski’s previous film, L’amour braque, but is also of key importance here. Lucas says, “My words string along like pearls,” and they essentially bind together his sense of self, his disease, and his complicated relationship with Blanche. Word games serve as a form of seduction, but naming acts in a far more complicated function, as it is at once poetic and pedantic.

It is perhaps here that autobiographical elements creep into the film; Lucas’s relationship with the much younger Blanche parallels Zuławski’s lengthy partnership with Sophie Marceau not only in terms of the age gap, but in the sense that it hints at a particular exchange of power. Pygmalion — the mythic sculptor who fell in love with one of his own creations — has been frequently evoked to describe their relationship, but it’s also worth considering Svengali, the antagonist of du Maurier’s influential but somewhat forgotten novel Trilby (the inspiration for Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera), in relation to both the director and the protagonist of Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jour.

A beautiful young English girl who is the object of adoration for many men, Trilby falls prey to Svengali, a sinister Eastern European hypnotist and musician, who transforms her into a successful singer. While neither Lucas nor Zuławski possess his villainous qualities, Svengali molds Trilby into a talented performer with the use of hypnotism, which is coincidentally also an important element of Blanche’s stage act. Her partner, the hysterical, turban-clad François (Sady Rebbot), using the stage name of the Raj de Pondichéry, must first put her in a trance before she can use her mediumistic powers. Like Trilby, who doesn’t remember a moment of her singing career while conscious, Blanche claims to have no memory of what she has told audience members. She says that being on stage is “a black hole… I’m there but not really.” She admits to being taken back to the kitchen where she crouched as a child, watching her father abuse her mother.

Though Lucas does not use hypnotism on her, he subtly manipulates her through language. Their lexicons — distinct because of differences in age, class, intelligence, and education, as well as Blanche’s compulsive need to rhyme — begin to bleed together. In the essay “On Language as Such,” Walter Benjamin discussed the connection between mind, identity, and language. He wrote, “Because the mental being of man is language itself, he cannot communicate himself by it, but only in it” (65). Lucas defines himself, remembers himself, and orders the mind that is slipping away from him, purely through language. Many of Zuławski’s protagonists attempt to violently exert control over a world thrown into chaos, but Lucas’s attempts are internalized and gentle, arguably even creative rather than destructive.

Benjamin implies that the use of words, particularly to name things, is a fundamentally creative act and, in essence, a divine one. “Language is therefore both creative and the finished creation; it is word and name” (68). Lucas’s way of connecting with Blanche through language, then, is not only an instructive act and a fertile one, but is also in itself a type of union. Through words, he finds himself in Blanche; he tells her, “My love, my life, when I’m lost, I find you. My speech is nourished by you.”

The function of storytelling, wordplay, and even confession — their respective traumatic pasts and the resultant emotional pain link them together just as much, perhaps even more so than sexual attraction — is what makes Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos joursand Lucas himself so different from other romantic tales of older men finding love with younger partners at the seaside. Classic literary examples, like Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Nabokov’s Lolita, or even Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, generally involve the protagonists imposing an elaborate fantasy on the object of their desire, while Lucas seems to approach Blanche from a place of innocence, a genuine desire to know rather than the will to possess.

An example of this can be found in their first romantic scene together, in his hotel room in Biarritz, where he has followed her. In a profoundly tender moment, she falls asleep in his lap and he undresses her and puts her to bed without any sexual overtures; as inL’important c’est d’aimer (and a similar scene in Possession), Żuławski conveys a moment of romantic love stripped of its erotic connotations. But unlike L’important c’est d’aimer, where there is obviously a sense of frustrated tension between the potential lovers, here there is a rare moment of peace and almost luminous understanding that echoes an earlier line of Blanche’s dialogue: “I came looking for you because you touched my heart.”

In general in Żuławski’s films, love is sudden, chaotic, and ultimately random, striking haphazardly into the lives of his protagonists. It acts as a powerful, often violent agent of change. The majority of these relationships revolve around a love triangle and this is one of Żuławski’s only films without one. He coyly references this in two mirrored scenes: one in which Blanche gets into bed with her husband (who she seems to be married to in name only), a bisexual who is already there naked with another man, and a later scene where Lucas sits down on a bed that has two naked women in it.

Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours takes quite a different approach to love and it is perhaps his most tender film. Here love is about knowing; about shedding the masks we wear and putting the performative aspects of life to rest; and about understanding mutual experiences of suffering. It’s difficult for me to resist the impulse to read this film, along with La note bleue (1991) and La fidélité (2000) — in other words, his three films with Sophie Marceau after their relationship began on the set of L’amour braque— as deeply personal catalogues of an intense, but complicated partnership.

Żuławski shows that in both positive and negative ways, to some extent love involves a dissolution of individual identity, the merging of respective traumas and personal pain. Blanche, manipulated by everyone around her and unable to really ever shut out psychological agony thanks to her alleged psychic gifts, cries, “Love means pain, lots of pain.” The film is littered with examples of romantic couples who drive each other to despair, violence, and even death. For example, Lucas and Blanche’s first meeting is in a café (a common setting for romantic turbulence in Żuławski’s films), where they witness a domestic dispute between a potentially drunk middle aged couple that ends with a tearful reconciliation.

Their first sex scene is a disturbing blend of sexual and psychic intimacy. He tells her, “talk to me like you’re in a trance,” and the sequence entails a sort of therapy session. She tells him of the abuse she suffered as a child and reveals she knows that his parents died at night, in a body of water, which corresponds to his repeated flashbacks of his father drowning his mother, presumably an act of jealousy. Though many of them adopt a nonlinear (or seemingly nonlinear) structure, this is one of Żuławski’s few films to make use of the flashback, particularly during moments when Lucas is slipping away because of his illness, or when Blanche is slipping into a trance state —  in other words into liminal spaces where their earliest, deepest pain exists as if in some sort of temporal loop.

The film’s central contradiction is that people come together in love with seeming inevitability, even though it often destroys them. Lucas says, “I hate weddings, couples, betrayals, people tearing each other apart,” mere moments before he tells Blanche that he loves her. While it would be a stretch to say that the film has masochistic themes, love is bound up inextricably with suffering. I’ve already written about Dostoyevsky’s influence on Żuławski — particularly in regards to his two previous films, Le femme publique, a loose adaptation of the novel Demons, and L’amour braque, inspired byThe Idiot — and the author’s words in a story with several parallels to Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” ring true for Żuławski’s film: “We can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love” (157).

But unlike the unnamed protagonist of this rather sentimental story, who decides to commit suicide because he is convinced of his own utter ridiculousness, Lucas contends with more than just emotional suffering or existential crisis thanks to his rapidly advancing disease. With the exception of tuberculosis, that Romantic-era plight often symbolic of the tormented artist, terminal illness is not an overwhelmingly popular subject in cinema (though I’m intentionally ignoring the dozens of recent, milquetoast female-centered melodramas with cancer-related plots). In Susan Sontag’s seminalIllness as Metaphor, she conjectured that this is because “it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease” (20).

While Lucas’s specific plight is unnamed, he’s told that it is a virus that “kills 400 a year” and its onset is rapid, inexplicable; it will consume his brain. It’s difficult to romanticize terminal illness — and thus its victims — because it sits at the crossroads of social taboo and our unconscious fears of death. Sontag wrote, “Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious… Contact with someone afflicted with a disease regarded as a mysterious malevolency inevitably feels like a trespass; worse, like the violation of a taboo. The very names of such diseases are felt to have a magic power” (6).

Of course, exceptions of this abound when disease is used as a symbol for moral decline, mental illness, or even a general state of existential suffering — as Lucas’s seems to be. Sontag wrote much about the historical perception of a link between disease and mental illness and even just general unhappiness, moody temperaments, and repressed desire, quoting Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: “Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed” (Sontag 20-21). In general, Mann used disease frequently throughout his novels: the protagonist of The Magic Mountain contracts tuberculosis, Death in Venice’s Gustav von Aschenbach dies of cholera, syphilis is a main theme in Doctor Faustus, and the heroine of The Black Swan is inadvertently given a short-lived second youth thanks to uterine cancer.

Many decades before Thomas Ligotti would suggest something similar in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mann even hinted that life itself is a disease. He forged a link between biological and spiritual damnation in The Magic Mountain when he wrote, “And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall” (285-286).

While Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours takes place in a world parallel to The Magic Mountain, with a cast of Żuławski’s typically colorful side characters populating the Biarritz resort, the film lacks the caustic if somewhat complicated nihilism of Mann’s novel, with its bleak ending that implies the protagonist is going off to die in the First World War. In a strangely optimistic conclusion, Żuławski’s protagonists walk into the Atlantic, committing suicide together. This is also the culmination of the film’s numerous water themes, which range from visual references (Lucas takes a bath fully clothed) to verbal ones, as well as the lake that serves as the location of his parents’ murder-suicide. Lucas says, “Love is a pond that can drown you.” Earlier in the film, he tells Blanche, obliquely referencing his illness, “I’m like a bathtub, letting the water run out.” She says, “Let it run out on me.”

Carl Jung wrote of water (particularly sea water) as symbolic of the collective unconscious, while it is often described in mythology and literature as a place of exploration and transformation, the “sea change into something rich and strange” that Shakespeare wrote of in The Tempest. This is not the lonely, stormy sea of Joseph Conrad, another of Żuławski’s major literary influences; some of the film’s last lines of dialogue note it as a place of rebirth for the two lovers: “Like the current flowing into the river, like Blanche, awakening in love with her lover. By accident, not knowing where or when, they’ll complete the circle again as children.” As a result, their suicide feels more like a beginning than an untimely end, a way to a reassemble themselves from broken parts. He tells her, “Even if we’re different, together we’re whole.”

Daughters of Darkness: Episode 6

The fifth episode of the podcast I'm co-hosting is now up!

From the Diabolique site:

In the sixth episode of Daughters of Darkness, Kat and Samm continue on to the third part of their four-episode discussion of the work of director Andrzej Zuławski. They start out looking at Zuławski’s two loose Dostoyevsky adaptations, La femme publique (1984) and L’amour braque (1985). La femme publique, inspired by Dostoyevsky’s novel Demons, follows a young, inexperienced actress who is cast in a film adaptation of Demons and begins a relationship with the controlling director, while political violence and conspiracy erupts around them. L’amour braque, Zuławski’s first film with his long-time partner Sophie Marceau, is an adaptation of The Idiot and focuses on a strange young man named Léon, who gets caught up with a criminal gang and falls in love with the leader’s girlfriend. 

Finally, they explore two of Zuławski’s most neglected films, Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1989) and Boris Godounov (1989). Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours again stars Sophie Marceau as a troubled young performer in a traveling psychic act. She begins a complicated relationship with a computer programmer suffering from a disease that affects the language center of his brain. Boris Godounov is a unique musical production in Zuławski’s catalogue and is a particularly frenzied adaptation of Mussorgsky’s classic Russian opera about the disastrous reign of a man believed to have murdered the child of the former tsar. 

LA FEMME PUBLIQUE (1984)

While literary inspiration played a prominent role in the early career of Polish director Andrzej Zuławski — resulting in outright adaptations in the case of his first two short television films, Pavoncello (1969) and The Story of Triumphant Love (1969), as well asL’important c’est d’aimer (1975) and his rudely interrupted production of On the Silver Globe (1988) — possibly his most ambitious attempt came at the midpoint of his career with La femme publique (1984). Co-scripted by French writer Dominique Garnier, the film is an adaptation both of Garnier’s memoirs of her early years in Paris, and of Dostoyevsky’s chaotic, reactionary opus from 1872, Бесы (Bésy) aka Demons. (Though it is often translated as The Possessed, I’ve decided to go with the more literal title, partly because “possessed” is misleadingly passive in the context of the novel’s plot.) This might seem like a fundamental contradiction — as Garnier’s memoirs focus on themes of femininity, sexuality, and art, while Dostoyevsky’s novel is a hysterical meditation on political violence — but it’s a contradiction that is not only key to understanding the film but lies at the heart of much of the director’s output in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

La femme publique follows Ethel (Valérie Kaprisky), a model and actress auditioning for a part in an upcoming filmic adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Demons. Despite her inexperience, she is hired by the charismatic yet abusive young director, Lucas Kesling (Francis Huster), a Czech émigré working in Paris. They begin a complicated sexual relationship as the production gets underway, and the stress of both causes Ethel to slowly lose touch with reality. She also finds herself drawn to Milan (Lambert Wilson), another Czech émigré who mistakes her for his missing wife, Elena (Diane Delors), a role Ethel willingly accepts. But she comes to believe that Elena may have been murdered and it seems Milan has been drawn into a plot of political violence.

On the surface level, La femme publique has some of Zuławski’s cinematic signatures: it essentially focuses on a tortured love triangle and it deals with the lives of artists. But — like The Devil and On the Silver Globe — it can be frustratingly abstruse and cannot be seen as a direct adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel, but rather something of a spiritual successor. Never an easy director to pin down in terms of genre, where some of Zuławski’s earlier films experimented with elements of the horror genre — such as The Third Part of the Night, The Devil, and Possession — La femme publique abandons that approach for a blend of drama, romance, and political thriller that simply can’t be classified.

Perhaps intentionally, this has parallels to Dostoyevsky’s complex maneuvering inDemons, which is also a dizzying blend of genres, themes, and subplots. James Goodwin wrote, in Confronting Dostoevsky’s Demons: Anarchism and the Specter of Bakunin in Twentieth-Century Russia, “Demons is not a historical novel in any traditional sense, but a complex, hybrid entity that combines elements of separate, unfinished projects into a synthetic ‘chronicle’ of political conspiracy. It is a work, moreover, in which suicide, rape, grisly murder and sadism mix rather unexpectedly with comedy and even buffoonery” (3). Like Dostoyevsky, Zuławski divides screen time between two major (though overlapping) plots with terrorism and political violence as a strong subtext. I think a grasp on the novel and its themes is key to understanding the film, far more so than Garnier’s memoirs, for instance.

And as with Zuławski’s final film, Cosmos (2015), he was ahead of the curve with his choice of source material. Goodwin explains that Demons was actually one of Dostoyevsky’s least popular works for the majority of the twentieth century, particularly in Soviet countries, and it was not widely read until several years after the release of La femme publique. He wrote, “the novel’s circulation in Russia did not begin to meet popular demand until the final years of perestroika, which saw the first separate edition of Demons in nearly a century. Over the next six years, from 1989 through 1994, Russian publishing houses produced at least eighteen new editions of Demons” (1). This was largely due to the difficult and controversial nature of the book, which is packed with scalding indictments of political violence, terrorism, and the open-ended, ineffectual sort of leftism that made the book just as relevant in the 1970s as it was in the decade of its release, the 1870s.

Demons initially follows two aged friends, the failed academic Stepan Verkhovensky and his demanding benefactress Varvara Stavrogina, and the goings on in their small town. But it soon comes to focus on their respective, somewhat estranged sons, Pyotr Verkhovensky and Nikolai Stavrogin. While the younger Verkhovensky is involved in some sort of underground revolutionary organization, Stavrogin is the subject of much gossip about his scandalous behavior, which includes a possible affair with the beautiful Lizaveta Tushina and a secret marriage to the mentally unstable Marya Lebyadkina, who is essentially the town fool. Verkhovensky is devoted to Stavrogin, but cultivates a group of young co-conspirators and even a local following that includes the governor’s wife. His scheming results in chaos at a town ball, arson, and a dizzying number of murders that climaxes with Stavrogin’s suicide.

In Demons, Dostoyevsky describes the terrorists led by Verkhovensky as “nihilists,” though this isn’t really accurate but reflects the political climate in Russia in the 1860s. In Margaret Heller’s essay, “Dostoyevsky on Terror and the Question of the West” inTerror and the Arts: Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib, she explained, “The thought that terrorism and nihilism belong together is not a new one, for there is a close connection between the history of the two terms, both in their origins in late eighteenth-century Europe and in their elaboration during the nineteenth century in Russia. They were, in fact, coined roughly in the same period, the time of the French Revolution. A connection between the philosophy of nihilism and the politics of terror was made by Joseph de Maistre, a Catholic conservative, who argued that the former’s assertion of human freedom from authority had, as its necessary consequence, the latter. Maistre’s denunciations of theophobia, ‘the insurrection against God,’ nihilism (rienisme), and any belief in political progress due to human enlightenment, were especially influential in Russia as the result of his period of exile in that country” (84-85).

Demons was actually inspired by influential anarchist Michael Bakunin and the revolutionary Sergei Nechaev, particularly the relationship between the two men, Nechaev’s crimes, and his later trial. Heller wrote, “Nechaev was a particularly unscrupulous figure, who had managed to charm Bakunin, and he became the model for the character Peter Verkhovensky” (87). There are strong parallels between the two, namely a talent for manipulation, a tendency to turn on collaborators, and murder. Little in the way of actual terrorist actions occur in the novel, though, and much of the conspirators’ time is devoted to verbal conjecture and secret meetings, with one important exception. Heller wrote, “They possess no common ideology, but rather display a range of theoretical positions. Their leader, Peter Verkhovensky, decides to solidify the loyalty of his followers by having them participate in the killing of one of their number whom Peter has falsely accused of treachery, just as Nechaev did in real life” (89).

As in the novel, the use of political terrorism in the film is murky and constantly overlaps with the events of the characters’ private lives, particularly their fraught romantic relationships. Zuławski’s films are frequently described as hysterical and while this is really too limiting of a description, he certainly captures the spirit of hysteria and frenetic energy that is at the heart of Demons. The novel’s somewhat anonymous narrator relates the conspirators’ reaction to a certain scene — an act of arson that temporarily covers up a double murder — that sums up the spirit of the film as well: “’It’s all incendiarism! It’s nihilism! If anything is burning, it’s nihilism!’ I heard almost with horror; and though there was nothing to be surprised at, yet actual madness, when one sees it, always gives one a shock.”

Though it is relatively restrained, Zuławski does weave his own tale of political violence in with Dostoyevsky’s. Kesling explains that he wants to adapt the novel because it is “a prophetic tale about those who try to change the world through violence,” and in a strange way he becomes the embodiment of both Stavrogin and Verkhovensky. Zuławski selects key scenes from Demons to include as the film-within-a-film and the majority of these have to do with political content. The scene of one of Verkhovensky’s meetings is brilliantly filmed as a sweaty match in an indoor tennis court, where it is declared that “murder, blackmail, extortion, bombs” will be added to their agenda, and a list of people to be killed should be drafted immediately.

In addition to this film-within-a-film, Zuławski makes clever use of television broadcasts and media, a technique he would return to for La fidélité (2001). This is where Ethel learns of the murder of a woman with gold high heels who has had her fingerprints burned off with acid —who she believes is Kesling’s former lover, Elena, that he has murdered and whose identity she will soon come to accidentally assume — as well as the assassination of the Archbishop. The man is shot to death while getting into a car at a party given in his honor, which is seen on TV with a glimpse of Kesling in the frame. It is implied that the director not only filmed, but also orchestrated, this event.

Ethel also physically takes part in this sense of escalating violence: barely 20 minutes into the film, she and Kesling are caught a riotous protest in the streets, she and Milan are later involved in car chase which ends in a shootout and an explosion, and Zuławski lingers over the filming of a key concluding scene from Demons, where the character Shatov is shot in the head and executed. It’s important to note that Milan is essentially a stand in for Shatov and the two have an overwhelming number of similarities.

And just as Dostoyevsky was reacting to Russian radicals in the nineteenth century, soLa femme publique is a reaction to the revolutionary leftism that grew out of what is now known as the New Left. A loose movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s that resulted in much positive change — including advances in civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and freedom of speech — it also had a perhaps inevitably violent side. What began, for many, as a sort of post-Marxist protest against Stalinism, the Cold War, and the war in Vietnam, among other things, resulted in mass student protests in England, France, Germany, and the US. This led to the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Parisian uprisings the same year that effectively shut down the city and even, temporarily, the national government, as well as rioting in Poland that resulted in deaths and extensive property damage.

But this took an even darker turn in the ‘70s and early ‘80s with the emergence of several radical, militant groups working throughout Europe, many of whom were responsible for wide-scale terror campaigns: assassinations, kidnappings, bombings, arson, attacks on embassies, airplane hijacking, and even bank robberies. Organizations like the German Rote Armee Fraktion, the Irish Republican Army, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — and its most visible member, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez aka Carlos the Jackal — were instrumental in shaping contemporary understandings of terrorism.

Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, who, like Zuławski, was kicked out of the country and forced to emigrate west, wrote often about the contradiction at the heart of leftism, particularly how the idea of utopia could so quickly become a fascistic quest for personal power for a select few. In “The Concept of the Left,” he wrote, “A utopia, if it proves so remote from reality that the wish to enforce it would be grotesque, would lead to a monstrous deformation, to socially harmful changes threatening the freedom of man. The Left, if it succeeds, would then turn into its opposite—the Right” (147). It seems to be this violent, ugly transformation that Zuławski is attacking in La femme publique. Certainly in later interviews, he was deeply critical of anyone that supported such organizations, directing a fair amount of vitriol towards German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was rumored to have financially supported the Rote Armee Fraktion.

As in Demons, these historical organizations, and La femme publique, the central revolutionary figures seem to be on more of an underhanded quest for power than really desiring any long-lasting societal transformations. Merriam-Webster defines terrorism as “the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.” While Kesling is ultimately revealed to be secretly orchestrating a political assassination, he also uses these principles on his film set and in his private relationship with Ethel; coercion, humiliation, violence, and even blackmail become regular occurrences. He says to her, “You’re mine. I made you. I can take you back or send you back whenever I want.”

Mary McCarthy’s sentiments on Verkhovensky in “Ideas and the Novel: Dostoevsky’s ‘The Possessed’” for the London Review of Books could easily be applied to Kesling. She wrote, “The only demon is Verkhovensky, who believes in nothing, has no ideas or principles. If he is an Idea, which I wonder about, it is an idea without specific content – a principle devoted (but not dedicated) to destruction. He is aware of a lack in himself, which is why he turns to Stavrogin. The nucleus needs a centre, and he himself cannot be that, for he is not within but without – a manipulator and strategist.” But the words of Joyce Carol Oates, writing about Demons for The Georgia Review, also ring true for Zuławski’s fictional director: “A demonic frenzy is loosed about him and through him, yet Stavrogin is dying of boredom. Like Raskolnikov in his cramped cell of a room, Stavrogin, though he wanders through Europe, though he makes a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, and visits Egypt, and even Iceland, goes nowhere at all: he is suffocating, doomed.”

In uniting the two figures of Stavrogin and Verkhovensky within one character, Kesling, and fleshing out the romantic angle, Zuławski draws an elegant if jarring parallel between the themes of the two books that inspired La femme publique. On one hand, there is the story of the Pygmalion-like relationship between a megalomaniacal director and an inexperienced actress who is objectified almost to the point of farce; on the other, a tale of political violence orchestrated by a nihilistic fantasist. And just as Stavrogin commits suicide at the end of the novel — leaving a note that says, “No is to blame, I did it myself” — Kesling actually hangs himself while filming the same scene. But, very much unlike the events of Demons, Zuławski’s first major female protagonist is left standing, theoretically in control of her own destiny.

Originally written for Diabolique.

Daughters of Darkness: Episode 5

The fifth episode of the podcast I'm co-hosting is now up!

From the Diabolique site:

In the fifth episode of Daughters of Darkness, Kat and Samm continue on to the second part of their four-episode discussion of director Andrzej Zuławski. This time they discuss his work in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when he was forced to leave Poland over the controversy surrounding his film The Devil (1972), which was banned by the communist government. His first French film, L’important c’est d’aimer (1975), which really launched his career in Europe, featured an international cast including Romy Schneider, Fabio Testi, and Klaus Kinski. Set in the worlds of soft and hardcore pornography, as well as avant garde theatre, it explores the tragic love triangle between a struggling actress and a photographer. 

This is followed by a lengthy discussion of On the Silver Globe (1988) — a surreal sci-fi epic based on a novel written by his own uncle — a film he returned to Poland to make after the success of L’important c’est d’aimer. But after a costly and intensive shoot that was nearly complete, the Polish government canceled this production and Zuławski wasn’t able to complete it for another decade. It remains unfinished, though it was recently restored. The episode concludes with a look at Zuławski’s most famous film, Possession (1981), an unsettling work about the dissolution of a marriage in divided Berlin starring Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani.

POSSESSION (1981)

As I’ve been slowly making my way through Andrzej Żuławski’s catalogue for Diabolique, I think the title I’ve dreaded writing about most is the director’s only English-language film and his most well-known, Possession (1981). Made in the wake of his divorce from actress Małgorzata Braunek and the frustrating, failed production of On the Silver Globe (1988), shut down due to interference from the communist Polish government, Possession is ultimately about the breakdown of a marriage in divided Berlin. It attracted to cult cinema fans because of its numerous horror genre and crime film elements, as well as an almost violently disorienting sense of the surreal. To my dismay – and probably more so Żuławski’s, though he commented that this is how he initially pitched it to a producer – it seems to be generally known as the film where a woman fucks an octopus.

Mark (Sam Neill) returns home to Berlin from an undisclosed assignment somewhere in the East, possibly espionage-related, that has kept him away from his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), and young son, Bob (Michael Hobgen). But Anna is planning to leave him and it comes to light that another man, the suave yet domineering Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), has been in the picture for some time. Despite the fact that their marriage is rapidly disintegrating, Mark is desperate to get Anna back. He has her followed by a private investigator (Carl Duering), who learns that she rents a dilapidated apartment, where she keeps a horrible secret.

Possession has frequently been labelled a horror movie, with numerous critical comparisons to David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), another film that examines the devastation caused by divorce and the literally monstrous potential of female sexuality. But one of Żuławski’s many strengths as a filmmaker is his penchant to defy genre and use it to his own ends rather than the other way around, a tendency that can also be seen in films like The Third Part of the Night (1971), The Devil (1972), and Szamanka (1996). Labelling Possession a horror film is unfairly limiting. It does have a monster: a nightmarish, tentacled mass designed in essentially one night by effects wizard Carlo Rambaldi (of Alien fame) that is not only Anna’s lover, but was also birthed by her. And it does have numerous, often gory acts of violence, including self-mutilation and murder.

But the film’s monster — and its horror elements in general — are little more than a MacGuffin. It follows an emotional logic that is governed only by the chaos and horror that accompanies the dissolution of its central romantic relationship, a journey undertaken by Sam Neill’s Mark. A loose stand in for Żuławski himself, Mark is actually the last in a line of somewhat passive, bewildered male protagonists that guide the director’s early films, including The Third Part of the Night, The Devil, and L’important c’est d’aimer (1975), a type he wouldn’t return to until his recent, final film, Cosmos (2015). Mark’s sole motivation is to get Anna back, though it seems increasingly like his interest lies in possession rather than love. Control and domination — psychological as well as physical — are important themes of the film. Mark demands Anna’s return, not with romantic gestures, but by telling her, “you must restore order.”

Ingeborg Bachmann, remembered for her affairs with writers Paul Celan and Max Frisch as much as for her own poetry, said in an interview, “Fascism is the primary element in the relationship between a man and a woman.” Anna’s actions — hysterical and nonsensical as they may seem — can be understood as attempts to exercise control over an environment in which she has none, in which control is constantly usurped. Mark asks what she really wants, but won’t let her speak. And Heinrich, who imperiously states, “no one has a right to impose his will on anyone,” is the most manipulative of all.

Their ultimately united attempts to encroach on Anna’s freedom, which includes harassment, surveillance, physical abuse, and the employment of a private detective, mirror the film’s Berlin setting: a city divided on one side by the cheery, forced optimism and political corruption of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and on the other by the claustrophobically impoverished communism of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. While Heinrich initially seems like a comical figure, Żuławski described him as “dangerous like poison,” and connected him to a wider discussion about Possession, the legacy of communism, and Anna’s search for freedom. He discussed the fact that Heinrich perhaps believes he has liberated Anna. Żuławski said, “Maybe in a sense, he did. That reminds me of an old communist saying – Liberated towards what? What do you want to do with your liberty? Do you liberate in order to destroy?”

Anna’s search for liberation is the true center of Possession’s universe and she is the reason why I have such a profound, admittedly uncomfortable attachment to this film. As a teenager and young adult, I didn’t really have any female role models or even really fictional female characters to whom I could relate. In my mind, being biologically female was circumstantial and had no more or less of an impact on my identity than being left-handed or being born in the 1980s. You can imagine my delight, then, at a relatively minor line in Possession: Helen — Bob’s school teacher and Anna’s double — says, “There is nothing in common in women except menstruation.”

But because of my difficult personal history, I have a more challenging time encountering female characters who have dealt with sexual trauma and/or mental illness. This is due to the fact that, unlike their male counterparts (at least in terms of mentally ill male characters, as male rape/abuse survivors are almost nonexistent on screen), both mainstream and cult cinema generally present them as little more than hysterical stereotypes. For example, as much as I love Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Polanski’s sniveling heroine, utterly devoid of personal agency, is one of the worst perpetrators of this type in modern genre cinema.

Anna, though, is a revelation. I’ve heard criticisms that her behavior — brought startlingly to life by Adjani in one of the most remarkable performances in cinema history — seems overwrought and unbelievable, but to me, it was more than just plausible, as I lived several of these moments. I saw Possession for the first time in my early 20s and it was incredibly liberating to see this acted out on screen and presented at face value. Żuławski, never one to coddle his audience, mercifully refuses to explain her actions away and never apologizes for her. Her seeming psychosis can’t be chalked up to a single act of horrific trauma, but rather is just the accumulation of Hamlet’s “slings and arrows,” the gradual psychic erosion of life itself.

I know I’m certainly not the only writer or fan to have this reaction. In the introduction to House of Psychotic Women, Kier-la Janisse’s seminal volume on female hysteria in film — which doubles as a memoir — she wrote, “It all started with Possession… There was something terrible in that film, a desperation I recognized in myself” (7). Anna is a physical manifestation of the absolute horror of emotional intimacy, which provides a more palpable sense of terror to Possession than either tentacled monsters or bloody murder. Her inability to understand or even express herself becomes a like contagion, a force that must be exorcised, and it makes her act in increasingly erratic and incomprehensible ways throughout the film.

In Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, she writes about this nebulous sense of loathing, disgust, and taboo as a way to define the self. “‘I’ am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death. During that course in which ‘I’ become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit” (2). Anna’s actions — which include self-mutilation, destruction of her home, unrestrained screaming, and what can only be described as a psychogenic miscarriage with noxious physical side effects in a subway tunnel — are almost literal interpretations of Kristeva’s theory.

While it’s easy to make sense of abjection as that which is repulsive or even outré, Kristeva notes that it is primarily about breaking down order and control, another key element that aligns it with Possession. She writes, “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order” (4). It’s not that Anna doesn’t love Mark, but she’s unable to reconcile her desire for independence with the necessarily confining aspects of romantic and domestic life. It is when Mark (and later, Heinrich) forces the issue and becomes more controlling, including a brutal scene of spousal abuse, that she becomes more reckless and ultimately violent.

During one of their biggest fights, he both begs and commands her not to walk out the door. As a last resort he tells her pointedly, “Please don’t make me force you.” She screams in his face, “You can’t stop me! I’ll open the window and jump.” It’s not that Anna actively wants to commit suicide, but she is physically incapable of abandoning her struggle to discover who she is and what she wants without the rigid social structures that accompany committed relationships or even motherhood. At one point Helen says to Mark, “It’s so sad for you that freedom seems to mean evil,” a comment that seems to relate to this conflict with his wife.

On the surface level, there is a film noir-like duality between Anna and Helen, respectively recalling the tropes of femme fatale and the dutiful wife. Though they are physical doubles, Anna is violent and seductive, a danger to the family unit, while the majority of Helen’s screen time is concerned with childcare and domestic activities. It is partly this stereotypical vision of motherhood that Anna rejects. Kristeva describes abjection as a kind of “narcissistic crisis,” a desire to return to a “self-contemplative, conservative, self-sufficient haven” (14). Bob, Anna and Mark’s young son, becomes tragically caught up in these selfish impulses that both parents, but particularly Anna, exhibit.

Żuławski — obviously sympathetic to both families and children — uses the child as something of a moral barometer, shifting the audience’s sympathies in favor of either Mark or Anna. Early in the film, in order to try to manipulate Anna, Mark tells her he won’t see Bob, but is soon proven a caring father. Maybe the most heartbreaking moment concerning the child is when Mark returns home from days in the hospital and finds Bob left all alone, for an undisclosed amount of time. If you’ve never been neglected by one parent and then had to witness the agonized reaction of the other, it looks a lot like this.

Even before the film’s midway point, Anna has become obsessed with her monstrous offspring to the exclusion of all else. Kristeva writes that the abject is inherently perverse, taboo, and that it “kills in the name of life” as Anna literally does, to protect her progeny/paramour. “Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new significance” (15). The octopus creature is a manifestation of this alchemical process and is itself a force of creation. At one point in the film, Anna expresses a desire to “pierce reality” and the creature seems to have literally done this, resulting in more doubles than just Anna’s mirror image, Helen, but other, more alien duplicates that seem to have sinister intentions.

In this sense, Possession shares much with Żuławski’s first film, The Third Part of the Night: biographical elements, uncanny doubles, imminent apocalypse, and a sense of the sublime. Kristeva writes, “The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not the same moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bring them into being… The symptom: a language that gives up, a structure within the body, a non-assimilable alien, a monster, a tumor, a cancer” (11). As I explained earlier, the monster is really only a MacGuffin, but remains a visceral (and viscous) symbol of Anna’s existential terror, a simultaneous longing for life and death that is profoundly erotic.

I’m reminded of a line from Measure for Measure, when the lovelorn, imprisoned Claudio states, “If I must die I will encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in mine arms.” This morbid sensuality seems an inherent quality of Adjani’s — she would exhibit it in other films from the period like The Story of Adele H (1975), The Tenant (1976), and especially Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) — but also bleeds through the film’s general framework. While the use of nudity and physical contact is sparing and almost chaste, Żuławski, with the help of writer Frederic Tuten, makes particularly compelling use of dialogue, building a strangely erotic layer into the language and verbal tone of the film.

And while the character of Anna is undeniably a masterwork — and Possession itself — she is not Żuławski’s ultimate creation, but is the key to understanding a transitional point in his career as a director and thus in the unique series of female protagonists that would follow. Almost all of his subsequent films — La femme publique (1984), L’amour braque (1985), Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1989), La note bleue (1991), Szamanka (1996), and La fidélité (2000) — are defined by complex women. Like Anna, these characters (and the actresses that portray them) traverse a broad range from the basest abjection to the most sublime depictions of romantic love, in both cases often violently defying social constraints.

In conclusion, my frustration with Possession is two-fold, almost contradictory, and is certainly focused at filmgoers rather than the filmmaker himself. On one hand, it is directed at those who praise the film but fail to seek out any of Żuławski’s other offerings, despite the fact that this is easier to do with every passing year. On the other hand, it is also with those who write off the film for being absurd or purposefully not making any sense. It makes far too much sense to me and remains one of the finest films to aggressively and honestly tackle the subject of emotional agony.

Originally written for Diabolique.

L'IMPORTANT C'EST D'AIMER

After the reception of The Devil (1972) drove director Andrzej Zuławski out of Poland and into France, he didn’t make another feature film for three years, apparently filling his days in Paris with work as a writer. And though he spent a significant amount of time in the country as a student, his first French feature, L’important c’est d’aimer (1975), feels more like a generally European film and less specifically like a French one. Perhaps this is due to the melting pot of cast and crew members, namely the involvement of Austrian arthouse star Romy Schneider, Italian action and crime film star Fabio Testi, the incomparable Klaus Kinski in one of his greatest performances, and Zuławski’s genius camera operator (and frequent cinematographer) Andrzej Jaroszewicz. Perhaps this — along with the film’s central themes of love and longing — is also due to the fact that L’important c’est d’aimer was made by an exile, a man separated from his wife and young child.

While I don’t necessarily think it’s his most accomplished work from a technical perspective, against the odds L’important c’est d’aimer — which is generally translated as The Most Important Thing: Love or The Most Important Thing is to Love — seems to be my favorite of all Zuławski’s films. I say against the odds because by all rights my favorite should be The Third Part of the Night (1971), an absurdist horror drama set during the apocalyptic Nazi occupation of Poland. (To be fair, that’s my second favorite, and you can read my worshipful essay on it here.)

In many ways, L’important c’est d’aimer is the complete opposite of The Third Part of the Night: Zuławski’s first film with a contemporary setting, at its heart it’s a melodrama. And unlike the majority of his films, it has a straightforward narrative. It’s arguably the most accessible film of the first 20 years of his career as a filmmaker, a definite outlier up until maybe 1991’s La note bleue (another of my favorites, of course).

Loosely based on Christopher Frank’s novel La nuit américaine (renamed to avoid being confused with Truffaut’s La nuit américaine from 1973), the film follows the seemingly ill-fated relationship between a photographer, Servais (Testi), and a down on her luck actress, Nadine (Schneider). Though she longs for a legitimate acting career, she is forced to support herself by appearing in cheap sexploitation films because her immature husband, Jacques (French pop star Jacques Dutronc), spends all his time and money collecting photographs of famous actresses. Servais, who occasionally works as a photographer on porn shoots for a lower-level gangster, borrows money from his employer to partially bankroll an avant garde production of Richard III, with the guarantee that Nadine will be cast in the lead female role. Tensions between Servais, Nadine, and Jacques soon come to a head, setting in motion tragic events.

Among cult film circles — whether we’re talking arthouse, exploitation, or horror films — “melodrama” often feels like a dirty word and has essentially become a pejorative describing a work as shallow or frivolous. But in Thomas Elsaesser’s seminal essay, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” he argues that melodrama possesses a “radical ambiguity” and the ability to be powerfully subversive. My background is actually in theater history (due to a perhaps ill-advised obsession with both Georg Büchner and August Strindberg) and I’d love to launch into a discussion of the origins of melodrama in the 18th and 19th centuries, all the way from The Beggar’s Opera (1728) to The Bells (1871), but suffice it to say that Merriam Webster defines melodrama as “drama in which many exciting events happen and the characters have very strong or exaggerated emotions.” Additionally, whether we’re talking about film, drama, or literature, these two constants are joined by a tendency towards somewhat unbelievable coincidence in terms of plot and a sense of strongly polarized morals.

Zuławski was never one for black and white views of morality, preferring a level of greyscale that I think is what makes him so uncomfortable for so many viewers and thus so overlooked. Like many of the films of German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, arguably the greatest melodramatist of his generation, L’important c’est d’aimer’s chief strength lies in the fact that it is at once an exceptional work of melodrama — for instance, the heart-wrenching score from prolific French composer George Delerue is the only thing in existence that can make me cry on command — and also a masterful subversion of the genre. The film’s primary romantic act is a suicide and there is a certain irony to the fact that its central romantic relationship is never consummated, despite the fact that both members of the couple work in pornography and there is frequent sex and nudity throughout the film.

Elsaesser writes that, “what is typical of this form of melodrama is that the characters’ behavior is often pathetically at variance with the real objectives they want to achieve. A sequence of substitute actions creates a kind of vicious circle in which the close nexus of cause and effect is somehow broken and-in an often overtly Freudian sense-displaced” (79). This sentiment particularly applies to Nadine, who is trapped between an unfulfilling marriage and a disappointing career, neither allowing her to escape from the other. Schneider, whose performance revitalized her career and won her the inaugural César for Best Actress, looks truly exhausted and on the verge of a breakdown. Nadine’s husband, so obsessed with starlets, prefers the fantasy presented by his posters and film stills to living with a real actress and is unable to provide her with emotional, sexual, or financial support.

This stalemate is broken by the appearance of Servais in one of Zuławski’s many great “love at first sight” scenes, where a character is instantly transformed by the simple act of viewing a second character, a moment that will permanently alter the course of events. In his essay “The Sacred Conspiracy,” Georges Bataille wrote, “Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love” (Visions of Excess, 179). Ecstasy in this case does not merely mean a sense of euphoria or bliss, but is akin to a religious or mystical experience, one in which the subject enters a trancelike state and the self is, even temporarily, transcended.

If Zuławski’s films have any sort of consistent moral message, it seems to be that people are unhappy, but they don’t deserve to be — something he says almost verbatim in the commentary for Possession — and his plots often loosely follow a metaphorical ascent from the underworld. While some of his later films show characters escaping this misery and attempting to transform themselves through art — cinema in La femme publique, writing and music in La note bleue, photography in La fidélité, and so on — love seems to be the purest, though most painful, means to complete this alchemical process.

In the case of the melodramatic, or even conventional, hero, Servais is a curious, subversive example. Elsaesser explains that, “one of the typical features of the classical Hollywood movie has been that the hero was defined dynamically, as the centre of a continuous movement” (80). Servais, on the other hand, is almost pathologically passive for such a stereotypically macho male lead, a part for which Fabio Testi was perfectly cast, despite the unlikeliness of him starring in an arthouse melodrama. He is a pornographer (if perhaps reluctantly) and something of a lothario, but is unwilling to or incapable of pursuing a loveless sexual relationship with Nadine.

As a photographer, he records life rather than encountering it directly (much like the lead character of Zuławski’s later La fidélité), and spends much of the film spectating the action from empty theater seats, inspiring Nadine to call him the “Phantom.” Pygmalion-type relationships exist frequently in Zuławski’s films and though Servais encourages Nadine in her career — seemingly more than anyone else ever has — he resists forming this type of bond, generally remaining a mute witness rather than a motivational force. His intervention in her life is actually one of the ways in which the book and film differ. In Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin’s Shakespeare on Screen, she writes, “In the book, he himself writes the script; in the film, he agrees to bankroll Laurent Messala’s production of Richard III because he will cast Nadine as Lady Anne, ‘one of the best female roles ever” (81). This primarily financial participation is connected with one of the film’s main themes of moral and artistic prostitution.

While all the characters prostitute themselves to varying degrees, Servais seems to genuinely want nothing in exchange from Nadine. He effectively ends the film in a parallel to his opening scene where he first snuck onto the softcore set to photograph Nadine, had to bribe a member of the crew, and was beaten for his troubles. At the end of the film he is effectively bankrupted by financing Richard III for her and – in a traditionally melodramatic coincidence – is badly beaten by his former mob associates. Though by all rights they should have killed him, he is left alive, bleeding and crying on the floor.

There is something fundamentally childlike and naive about both Servais and Nadine, which heightens the contrast between innocent romantic love and sexual exploitation that is at the core of the film. Nadine’s real drive is not just a struggle to find a fulfilling love, but an almost existential struggle to comprehend love itself. At one point she breaks down in a café, smashing a glass (one of Zuławski’s often used visual tropes), and telling Jacques that “I love you means nothing.” Out of all the characters of L’important c’est d’aimer, her personal journey is perhaps the most profound, and, unlikely the majority of Zuławski’s heroines, she is even given a completely unexpected happy ending.

As with Servais, her actions in the opening and closing scenes have a direct parallel to each other. In the beginning of the film, Servais encounters her on a film set, in the middle of a scene where she is straddling a bleeding man. She is commanded to deliver her dialogue, “I love you,” but cannot bring herself to convincingly do so and begins to cry when Servais’ takes her picture. By the end of the film, she is leaning over a bloody, beaten Servais and is able to say, without hesitation and with much genuine depth of meaning, “I love you.”

A major change that Zuławski made from Christopher Frank’s novel is actually the role of Jacques, her husband, and the weight of the love triangle, Zuławski’s favorite dramatic structure. While Jacques is barely present in the novel, he has a greatly elevated importance here and the dynamic between photographer, model/actress, and cinephile/photograph collector is an elegant one that places a nearly equal emphasis on the twin themes of art and love. Of course, they are not trafficking in the “high” art of La femme publique or La note bleue, or the commercial world of La fidélité. In a sense, L’important c’est d’aimer is so subversive because it inserts the trappings of a conventional, bourgeois melodrama into the squalid world of pornography.

It’s likely that Zuławski was slyly commenting on some of the changes in French cinema during this period. The recently relaxed censorship laws allowed filmmakers to include increased amounts of nudity and softcore sex, resulting in titles like Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales (1974) and Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle (1974) and The Story of O (1975). These ushered in dozens of imitators that veered further and further from arthouse sensibilities and closer to low budget pornography. One of the film’s most shocking, unexpected moments actually occurs when Servais leaves the exploitation set where he first spies Nadine, and finds his way to a hardcore porn shoot, where it is revealed that he is actually late for work. Later, some of Nadine’s films are discussed – the titled bandied about the most is Nymphocula – and Nadine’s soon-to-be costar on Richard III (Kinski) enthusiastically recognizes the title and describes the plot as, “Two dykes in a castle with a dwarf!” He asserts that Nadine is “great” in the film.

Zuławski – who himself featured a liveried, Jew’s harp-playing dwarf in The Devil – seems less to be taking a pot shot at exploitation cinema and more the cult of obsession and fascination that surrounds actresses in general. He makes no distinction between Nymphocula and the exploitative power of mainstream cinema as represented by Jacques’ picture collection and his slavish devotion to fantasy over reality. This jab at the cult of the actress is almost ironic – and is perhaps a bit tongue in cheek – considering that Zuławski’s prowess as a director is largely bound up in his relationships with lead actresses, causing several of them to win major European filmmaking awards.

The hysterical, liberating, and almost physically unbelievable performances he wrenched from many of his lead actresses – such as his first wife Małgorzata Braunek, Isabelle Adjani, Valerie Kaprisky, longtime partner Sophie Marceau, and Iwona Petry – is perhaps more subtly expressed by Schneider, though she is no less impactful. In interviews, Zuławski occasionally spoke about how he convinced actresses to physically transform themselves, to shed conventional notions of beauty in favor of raw emotion that often made them appear ugly: Braunek’s horrible contortions, Adjani’s ecstatic vomiting, and Marceau’s snotty, swollen, and tear-streaked face. While Schneider escaped many of these physical injustices, he convinced her to abandon the thick layers of makeup that she felt preserved her youthful appearance (she was in her mid-‘30s during filming, though Nadine claims to be 30). In some sense, Nadine is ugly and despicable because she is so helpless, utterly adrift in a world where she is unable to either find a solid mooring or take responsibility for herself.

This provides a tangible link with her character in Richard III, Lady Anne. Historically, Anne is one of England’s more ignored queens, given shockingly little agency compared to women like Margaret of Anjou or Elizabeth Woodville. In Richard III, Anne is seduced by Richard over a corpse; not that of her husband, as is widely misunderstood, but over her father-in-law, though her husband is also recently dead. Despite being physically deformed, Richard undertakes a seduction of Anne defined by mannered speech, as he is a brilliant orator, and surprising sexual excess in Act 1, Scene 2. He says beautiful things to her, such as “Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep/ To undertake the death of all the world,/ So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom.” For Richard, this seduction is essentially another social mask — a favorite theme of Zuławski’s — one that allows him to exceed his vision of himself as “deformed, unfinished.”

While there are notable parallels between L’important c’est d’aimer and Richard III, Servais’s seduction of Nadine could not be more different than Richard’s seduction of Anne. Instead of providing a parallel between the two male leads, Zuławski uses the theatrical production — and the play that it so flamboyantly adapts, with a performance from Kinski that must be seen to be believed — as an important contrast. The use of theater that began in The Devil with Hamlet would figure strongly into all Zuławski’s films for at least the next decade.

Here Richard III seems primarily to function as a way to foreshadow the death of a husband and the subsequent seduction of his wife. Jacques’ ultimate sacrifice — a romantic act of suicide, rather than murder as in Shakespeare — is referenced several times before it actually occurs. Upon meeting Servais for the first time, Jacques mutters into Nadine’s ear, “I dreamt you were pouring Coca Cola in my ear. A nasty death!” This Hamlet reference indicates not only his impending death by poison, but also the central love triangle, as, like Richard III, Hamlet features a subplot about a man killing another man and then seducing his widow. During rehearsals for Richard III, the director of the play, Messala (Guy Mairesse), is unable to get the performance he wants out of Nadine and convinces Jacques, who happens to be on set, to lay in the coffin in the hope that it will inspire her.

Jacques’ actual death — agonizingly painful suicide by rat poison in a public bathroom — is not an act of violence or tragedy, but one of intense love. Suicide is a recurring theme in Zuławski’s films and it is often represented as a pathway to liberation. In this case, Jacques frees Nadine from self-imposed but steadfast bonds. In Bataille’s Guilty, he wrote, “Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I’m leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We’re brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a ‘questioning’ of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death” (109). L’important c’est d’aimer concludes with this great letting go, perhaps an unconventional but unequivocally happy ending, one that would not see its like in any of Zuławski’s film until Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1989), his love letter to Sophie Marceau that ends with the suicide of a couple.

Originally written for Diabolique.