Portrait d'une enfant déchue

Fashion model Lou Andreas Sand (Faye Dunaway) struggles with work and life. She struggles with relationships, with men, and with sex. She struggles with loneliness and with mental breakdown.

It's all about Faye Dunaway. It's a character study. It's well-made. Faye is bringing the same damage as she will in Chinatown. She's magnetic.

PUZZLE OF A DOWNFALL CHILD is about a famous fashion model who's burnt out on the business and moved to a cottage by the sea to reflect on her splintered life. Years of being treated as an object by photographers, stylists, agents, etc., has left her with a serious identity complex and an addiction to pills...although flashbacks show that she was somewhat unhinged to begin with. The film isn't really that good; as critic Pauline Kael noted when the film came out, "I have a constitutional aversion to movies about women whose souls have been lost, stolen or destroyed, especially when it isn't made clear -- and it never is -- whether the heroine had a soul in the first place." But what IS very special about the movie is simply the way that Dunaway LOOKS. Rigged out in precise red lipstick, false eyelashes and liquid eyeliner, she's meticulously photographed by director Jerry Schatzberg, a former lover and onetime fashion photographer. The story is inspired by the true life life of Anne Saint Marie, a fashion model who later came unglued. Schatzberg taped conversations with Anne Saint Marie and used her comments as a framing device for the story. Not a great film, but an interesting one nevertheless.

Dud story about a fashion model falling apart is given such a handsome, chilly look, precise editing and lovely music passages that one is nearly tempted to call "Puzzle of a Downfall Child", at the very least, half a success. Still, Faye Dunaway isn't charismatic enough to carry the weight of a leaden character portrait, one wherein the heroine feels her soul fragmenting yet also questions whether she still possesses a soul to lose...or perhaps never had one to begin with (she is a lapsed Catholic, after all). Dunaway's model (with the self-made-up name of Lou Andreas Sand!) is flashing back on her career while an ex-paramour and colleague tape-records her shallow reminiscences of bitchy, badgering photographers and lovers. Her earliest memories (particularly her first modeling assignment posing with an unleashed falcon) are quite vivid, but there's no substance or self-effacing humor in Carol Eastman's screenplay (penned under the alias of Adrian Joyce). Director Jerry Schatzberg, who worked on the original story with Eastman, allows Dunaway too much room to wail and wither and carry on, and after awhile she's as isolated from us as she is from her work. Adam Holender's cinematography and Michael Small's music are each exquisite, and Evan Lottman's editing also deserves praise; however, these attributes are in the service of a barren melodrama so removed from reality that the episodes are practically devoid of anything interesting. It's almost as if that's the point. *1/2 from ****

A landmark in independant american filmaking, Puzzle is the best film ever directed by Jerry Schatzberg. Faye dunaway is incredible. One of the best fims of the 70's.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why someone doesn't put this film out on DVD or video. Puzzle of a Downfall Child is a hauntingly spare film about the breakdown of beauty. Although less well known than The Panic in Needle Park, it is Jerry Schatzberg's masterpiece. His use of non-linear storytelling coupled with some incredibly dreamy flashback sequences made me feel as if, like heroine Lou Sands, I too was coming slightly undone. For Faye Dunaway fans (and really who isn't a fan of Faye's?), this film showcases not only her incredible beauty--the eyelashes are to die for--but also her talents as an actress. She is more believable as an actress portraying a model than any model portraying an actress could ever hope to be. If it should ever make its way to an art-house near you, you will do yourself a disservice if you miss it. After I left the theater, I kept thinking of that trite adage about how they don't make them like they used to.