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.

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.

"La femme publique" does not allow traces of subtlety. In fact, in fantasy or in the mixture between these two poles, everything is said or shown in excesses.

To the unsuspecting, it is the warning: the work of the Polish director Andrzej Żuławski is neither rest nor invitation to the contemplative gaze, nor does it want to be analytical. It allows, however, many reflections and moments of pure poetry, but its main characteristic is the disturbing, provocative, rebellious and critical figure about life and consequently about man.

"La femme publique" was made in 1984 with inspiration from the novel "Demons" by Dostoevsky. Scenes of this same healthy play used in a film that is being made within the film itself or what would be the main story "La femme ..." this use of metalanguage, which often complicates the understanding of the work, yields, in Counterpart, a valuable game that even equates the audience with the protagonist of the story, the dizzying Ethel (Valérie Kaprisky).

She equates in the sense that Ethel is a young aspiring actress who can not differentiate acting and reality, to the point of assuming the figure of a dead woman whose murderer is the abusive and displaced director Lucas Kesling (Francis Huster), add to this plot the A figure of Milan (Lambert Wilson), a Czech immigrant who is manipulated by the filmmaker (Lucas) to commit a political assassination. Among these three characters that form a love triangle that is never realized or wanted to be performed, we accompany the fears, insanities, challenges and impulses as archetypes of a fictional world mirrored to the real.

At various moments in the film, we feel as if we are as lost as Ethel, and as his character, there is no one who can give us hands, on the contrary, whenever someone arises we are attacked either verbally or physically, which establishes A very crazy game that makes us embarrassed, because when this game is fictional (that is being shot during the main movie) such aggressions are even well received, but when they reveal themselves in the reality of the lives of those actors, human beings, it is an aggression Even though there is a strong backing that we are watching a performance within the other, but again, as it is mirrored in real life, it is a madness and aggression common to human life.

Whether it's a recording set, a movie day, or the end of the movie, where actors like a theater revere the public's applause. In all these moments that mix reality and fiction, the palette of tones used in "La femme publique" does not allow traces of subtlety. In fact, in fantasy or in the mixture between these two poles, everything is said or shown in excesses. Because the traits are so gross, the moments of failure and the uncertainty of which world we are, soften this drama. It is interesting to note the theatrical references that accompany the director Andrzej Żuławsk, not only of theatrical authors, but in reference to theatricals like Brecht, with his political theater with ruptures and fragmentation of the scenes, besides the "I" narrator where the figure of the actor is Sometimes the intermediary of the author's ideas. Another theatrical reference is by Antonin Artaud is his theater of cruelty, where the actors look for in real situations and emotions to bring them and to revive them in the stage, like the young actress Ethel of the film, however, that is lost when mixing Reality and fiction.

Although relatively narrow, Zuławski weaves his own tale of political violence with Dostoyevsky. 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 strangely it becomes the incarnation of Stavrogin and Verkhovensky. Zuławski selects key scenes from "Demons" to include as the film within a movie and most of them have to do with political content. The scene at one of Verkhovensky's meetings is brilliantly filmed as a sweaty game on an indoor tennis court, where it is stated that "murder, blackmail, extortion, bombs" will be added to his agenda, and a list of people to be killed must Be drafted immediately.

The camera in the films of Żuławski is chained in scenes, advancing in the arrows and actively seeking the actors, most scenes of "Femme Publique" is struck by low and daring angles that make Kaprisky a species of totemic goddess or a lost soul in means To vertiginous and cavernous European buildings, spiral staircases and dilapidated columns. But this is also his most sumptuous film in terms of lighting, courtesy of the celebrated director of photography Sacha Vierny.

No longer the acting of the actors is the height of the film, but Valérie Kaprisky with its Ethel dominate the scene. If at the beginning of the film we have the young actress with lots of magazines of famous actors, the same happens with the consecration, even if fantastical of Ethel, stamping another pile of magazines, becoming the actress and woman publishes. Ethel's eroticism, through her body, her dance and her beauty, which is eternalized in this film and will surely be in the public's memory for a long time.

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.

It's a real shame that this movie has a such confused screen-play. We are acquainted to non-linear plots, but this one exceeds. Probably this is because the director himself performed as a screen writer, and so we often see shots that have a strong visual impact, and are tecnically impressive, but whose function within the storyline is unnecessary and confusing. So many elements remain undetailed, for instance Ethel's relationship with her parents and the underlying political conspiracy. And the mysterious bohemienne writer that appears twice in the movie... who is? And how comes that he is part of Ethel's background? At a certain point you ask yourself what is going on and what the movie is all about.

Editing is not always faultless, and there is some rough cut.

Coming to the bright side, as I noted above there are good shots, both for directing and for acting that is really good by all actors. Valerie Kaprisky who was then 22 old, appears gorgeous and dramatic at the same time. Huster and Lambert also play their parts convincingly.

Rating: *** (out of six)