La femme publique

Struggling actress Ethel (Valérie Kaprisky) does private nude modeling sessions for photographer André. Famed director Lucas Kessling wants her as lead in his adaptation of Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed". They get into a relationship and a surreal film production. He recruits dishwasher Milan Mliska (Lambert Wilson) to be her possessive disturbed husband as reality and fiction blend into this unreal journey.

This is an unreal film. Kaprisky is sexually unencumbered and magnetically charismatic. She does plenty of strut-walking. She powerfully fills the screen. Lucas Kessling is an intriguing mercurial character. The surrealism is interesting at first but it gets maddeningly unreal. The wild swings and crazy 180 turns frustrated me. There is one scene in particular where Ethel faints and completely recover immediately with everybody ignoring what happened. It's a cheap kind of surrealism. It's almost student film level. Other parts like her nude photography is unforgettable. At some point, the weird surreal twists and turns bored me by their unhinged-nature.

This movie might confuse and frustrate viewers and rightly so, for it's lack of discernible plot elements and objectives, but rightly so because Throughout his career Zulawsky as director is more concerned with making his viewers go thru the raw emotions, sights and situations rather than drawing conclusions or tying plots.

The key in this film is that everything is experienced thru the point of view of Ethel - a stunning Valerie Kaprisky - we are limited to what she experiences and thinks, and it is a very emotionally charged view, one in which only the senses and guts can be trusted ... to an extent.

This might be obvious, but the film also deals with a lot about sexuality, there is a lot of sexual tension throughout the film, right from the title and the first images the main force driving the film is the associative and intuitive.

The production is very detailed, and impressive in the sense that is firmly supportive of the history, I have always found Zulawsky a superior director in his choice of locations, actors, misè-en-scene, etc.

Finally it has a bit of uneven pace, and in the end this movie is more a feast for the senses than an intellectual mystery.

1 star.

Yes: again we are treated to a mess of histrionics, arm-flailings, neurotic marching to and fro, screaming, agonizing and despairing, with actors "method-acting" what the director must have been yelling at them at any random moment, like "Show me fear!" "Show me anger!" "Show me agony!" "Show me madness!" and what have you, resulting in a string of scenes coming from nowhere and going to no better end. We may discern some artistic and political topics of the day, but as is usual with such pretentious egotrips we mainly see that someone must have been primarily interested in sex scenes with the intention of ogling the nudity of the actress. Everything around that was just a smoke screen to feign "artistic motivation".

. Many reviewers praise the leading actress Valerie Kaprisky, but we mustn't overlook the fact that they are all males salivating over her onscreen full frontal and rear nudity. It may be high time that somene had pointed out that this actress is just plain ugly ... when you care to look higher from her breasts.

Andrej Zulawski's most famous film "Possession" was released more or less in English, but still barely made a lick of sense, so I didn't have much luck with this one which is so far only available in French or (in the version I saw)Italian. This may not matter though as much of the film is taken up by scenes of the gorgeous Valerie Kaprisky dancing around buck naked or having sex with various men. Model/actress Kaprisky plays a model/actress (there's a stretch). Her "modeling seems to consist mostly of her stripping to the skin and doing bizarre dances to horrid Europop numbers while a creepy, elderly photographer snaps pictures of her impressive torso. Maybe it's the awful music, but these sessions inevitably seem to end in her or the photog. having some kind of physical or emotional breakdown. Zulawski uses the same confusing temporal dislocation here he used in "Possession". In one session the photographer apparently drops dead from a heart attack, but in the next he is not only alive but apparently fit enough to go crazy, grab Kaprisky by the throat, and start shoving dollar bills in her mouth (and other, off-screen orifices)for some reason...

Meanwhile her character is also appearing in a legitimate movie (apparently some kind of costume drama). The director of the movie is bedding Kaprisky, but he seems more interested in trying to cause her to have some kind of real-life emotional breakdown for the sake of his "art" (ironically, Isabel Adjani had accused director Zulawski of trying to do the exact same thing to her in "Possession"). She also becomes involved with another crew-member who is apparently one of those vague French Marxist revolutionaries of that era (an era in which the US military was still protecting bourgeois France from all those "Marxist revolutionaries" over in the USSR). Naturally, a whole lot of pathos ensues.

Kaprisky gives a very committed performance, even if she is definitely no Isabel Adjani. This is probably her best film (although that's not necessarily saying much). The movie really isn't anymore non-sensical than "Possession" (in fact, it would probably be less so if it had English subtitles),and like that film it's at least not boring for one minute. If you take all that for a recommendation, by all means help yourself to this little slice of Gallic insanity.

One of the worst films I've seen in a long time, "La Femme Publique" hurls the viewer right into the middle of its incomprehensible "story", without any introductions: from the little I could gather, it's about an actress who gets into a triangle with her possessive, abusive director and another nutcase who gets involved in a political assassination (don't ask). In her spare time, she does nude dance shoots with a creepy photographer who apparently dies but comes back to life (don't ask). Andrzej Zulawski pushes all his actors into a state of collective hysteria, screaming their (meaningless) lines. And although Valerie Kaprisky has a fantastic body and is nude half the time, he manages to make the film totally unerotic and disturbingly misogynistic. The only reason I'm giving it a 2 out of 10 is that the movie-within-the-movie seems even worse!