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.

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!

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.

I am so grateful my girlfriend pushed this movie on me. Zulawski's POSSESSION might be my favorite film of all time, but I'd never seen a trailer for this one, so I hadn't yet thought to check out his next film following 1981's Possession, which is this, The Public Woman.

Now, Zulawski himself claims that he was asked to direct this movie by the producers who wanted to do an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel "The Possessed", but I am shocked to see that no one else has mentioned or inquired upon all the seemingly blatant parallels that this movie draws with Possession and it's production. There are endless details suggesting that the tyrannical director character in the film very obviously represents Zulawski himself, while the protagonist often seems to represent Isabelle Adjani (the lead actress from Possession). It's well known that Adjani had an intense and traumatic experience creating Possession, effecting her for years, and a great part of The Public Woman is about a director pushing a young actress to her absolute limits in an attempt to almost break or change her, in order to get the sort of performance he wants out of her. There are movements, sequences, lines of dialogue, and more that all directly correlate with this idea, then the fact that it's about adapting a book called "The Possessed" is icing on the cake. The French actress asks the director, "Why are you shooting your film in Germany?" This is all just a very intriguing element to me, and I love movies that sort of have this digging-through-the-4th-wall vibe by tying in publicly known elements from reality. The wildest part is that if this theory is correct, in the case of this film, rather than being an expression of catharsis as most similar cases would be, it's quite the opposite - a primarily narcissistic bloat piece which also happens to be artfully masterful.

Zulawski's signature olive green + puke color palette is in full effect here, and only he could make me love it. His signature camera work, often chaotic, claustrophobic, and sometimes even moving as if it has a mind of it's own - is all alive and well here as well. The stylishness of the filmmaking is cranked up to 11, but of course, the most important part of the film is the fully explosive and maniacal acting performances from the entire cast. The immense acting is what really brings the movie to it's own insane and legendary realm, and keeps it there. It seems undeniable that the director character represents Zulawski because there is no other explanation as to why we see acting performances in Zulawski's films that display a unique intensity that goes entirely unmatched. Every character in this movie is a monster aside from the beautiful, graceful lead played with grace, excellence, and almost inhuman spirit, by Valerie Kaprisky, who wasn't the original choice for the role and who was heavily doubted by the producers beforehand. They could not have been more wrong - Kaprisky is absolutely stunning and a complete force of nature.

The narrative will play with your head as it weaves in and out of a film production within a film - sometimes you won't know if what you're seeing is part of the film they're shooting, or simply part of the film you are watching. It doesn't get old, and it heavily adds to the surrealism of the entire experience. Sometimes it feels like the narrative is moving a million miles per hour, and sometimes it feels like it has you trapped in a corner so it can torture you for a while, but regardless it is a powerful one and it is a fully impressive and singular experience.

I've only seen 4 of Zulawski's films (the others being On The Silver Globe, which is one of the most challenging but impressive films I've ever seen, and his swansong Cosmos, which is one of the emptiest films I've ever seen), and although Possession is my personal all-time favorite, I think The Public Woman may very well be his most watchable in a universal sense. I will not hesitate to call it a masterpiece! Long live the Polish master.

I love this guy, this madman and anarchist of cinema. I love him for the reasons he seems to vex a lot of people; muddled screenplays is the frequent complaint, hard to understand, extreme in everything he does. It is simply a matter of approach. In ordinary films, the filmmaker presents a more or less conventionally understood reality, and asks of us to penetrate behind the words and masks of people hiding their true selves, to get to something essential of emotions and dynamics. We infer from a subtle gesture, from a meaningful look.

Zulawski's method is one of shattering the clean boundaries of roles and framed narrative, all the things that keep us at arm's length from ever really feeling the soul of a character in our skin, doing so with impunity, so that we are free to swim and see into the inner world of urges and emotional thought, pure mindstream. What you would normally have to infer is up there on the screen. The skin of consciousness has been turned inside out, reversed: the pedantic details of all this having linear sense and plot are now beyond our reach, the actual battered soul is visible.

This is nothing to scoff at, in fact it is the most advanced dimension in film. Reversed innerseeing. Ecstatically hovering out of self and story. It is what Lynch only accomplished with Inland Empire, acknowledging the Polish influence.

Possession is sublime, the pure convulsing horror of a soul being torn apart. It was out of this world, everyone from Cronenberg to Lynch sat down and took notice. The story goes that he was so hellbent on that film to coax the raw emotion he wanted out of Isabelle Adjani, he did some pretty horrible things to her. Here is the followup to that: an obsessive, half-mad filmmaker (ex-pat working in France) torments his young starlet on the artistic journey to perfection. Their film is an adaptation of Dostoyevski's The Possessed (wink). She is eager, talented, but the murky depths of his vision escape her.

Everything else is madness, flailing, fluid self, the exposing of raw nerves in the frantic experience of the mindstream.

This seems murkier than Possession, because it lacks the actual monster and clean symmetry of doubles. It's in the same vein. Forces in these people are so painful and overwhelming, the characters have splintered into several more selves, and each splintered self is maniacally pushing against the limits of his narrative - some of them inside the play, others in separate subplots. Two ex-pats, frustrated in Paris with the hypocrisy of art and religion - one of the murders a cardinal, both are present in the scene, both photographed in a film-within. Two actresses, both mistresses of the same two guys.

So he is angrier than Tarkovsky. Has none of Malick's piousness. Ruiz and Wojciech Has are playful, he is bitter and mad. He sees ugliness, sin, impurity. And he has several rough spots, of symmetry and politicking, both shouted.

But he worships the same awesome god: not the cardinals' god, but the recognition of something that goes beyond the small limits of reason and self, and tries to awaken the vastness of that in his own narratives of fluid and battered egos.

And he has trusted collaborators on the journey. Valerie Kaprisky is divine, ecstatic dancer to the mystery of shedding skin.

Sacha Vierny, that mage of cinematic light; Resnais, Greenaway, Ruiz, Zulawski, he has enriched all four with his eye.

And if all of that seems gibberish to you, you should know of the rich tradition of Buddhist gurus called mahasiddhas, who used madness and gibberish as a tool for wisdom. A similar notion of desired irrationality is encountered from Zen to Dada.

The thinking mind is a meddlesome monkey. Confound, confound, confound.

Something to meditate upon.