This is dedicated to Zulawski who passed away today; I'd like to think that he has found no god waiting and he's finally at peace.
This is pure Dadaist anarchy, a cacophony of deranged pantomime from start to finish. It begins with a gang in Disney masks holding up a bank, firing guns and shooting off bombs of colored smoke, hooting and screaming. They're a chorus in Zulawski's mad theater. They go up to the house of a lecherous politician of some kind where they abuse the tuxedoed company and set free a girl from a life of bought abuse.
The rest is a reveling spree up and down Paris, from lavish apartments and cobble streets to inside a theater. Zulawski always had an eye for exploring architectural spaces and so it is here. Cocktail parties segue in and out of orgiastic noise, almost everyone being indecent at one point or other. The naked body is offered and taken with a sense of dread. Characters flail and spasm as if something from inside the soul contorts, mocking or ruing this life encased in a human body.
Two male characters here are both surrogates for Zulawski. One the gang leader as director who stages the maddening spree around Paris, scoffs at norms, revels in revelry, who can't love the girl except possessively as an ingenue. The other man, picked up on the train, a hapless stooge - ex-pat from the Eastern Bloc no less - who wants to love truly, is sensitive and finds himself tossed about by all this madness, broken in the process of becoming a clown, also a surrogate for Zulawski.
In between them is the girl, gorgeous Sophie Marceau channeling more than a bit of Adjani, who is not sure of anything true and simply throws herself in search. "I live in the flesh, without pleasure" she quips. For near the end, Zulawski reveals the extent of the horror that pushes her from the inside. It happens with a film- within showing her mother's horrifying abuse at the hands of upper- class lechers. It ends with a hazy, mortified shot of Sophie watching through the bushes. The screen is then blow- torched.
The indecency, insofar as it's a genuine reflection of despair, I receive at a distance. It's certainly no affectation for Zulawski, in the way it feels for me in the hands of Gaspar Noe. Smearing it as he does all over the film however, the point threatens to be lost and probably needs to be salvaged. Hedonism here is then both the calloused emptiness of the idle well-to-do (both the cocktail- party and the 16mm film- within end in dehumanized agony) and the atavistic dance of the victims (Sophie and the man) as they struggle to shed the identity that partakes of that world.
Not being able to do it, as when later a countryside reverie with just the two of them in moments of secluded truth is intruded upon, he collapses back to that world for which he has only unmitigated disgust, a world of phony theater and politics (a phony revolutionary is staging The Seagull).
Some of it, as when characters flail and crow for no reason, is too much shouting for this viewer. But what I really wish is that he had been able to see the possibility of truly shedding that self, a life where the body is vessel for breath instead of a bag of skin that clings on you. There is no substitute for the poetry and love that come from respite.
As the most clear statement on Zulawski's love (and cinema) stands the scene near the end where the hapless man sits to be tied to a chair by her and has his face painted, before she throws him on a bed, in a ritualized enactment of how she has been treated by men, feeling herself on his skin. The swap of energy becoming intimacy.
This is all Zulawski's mad theater however, what he's been doing since the very start, there's nothing to outgrow for him. The film is someone who makes his poetry by throwing fine furniture at a fire, cackling as he does. The glow of destruction warms this man's soul, chases away the night. He burnt himself in my imagination once more.
This is pure Dadaist anarchy, a cacophony of deranged pantomime from start to finish. It begins with a gang in Disney masks holding up a bank, firing guns and shooting off bombs of colored smoke, hooting and screaming. They're a chorus in Zulawski's mad theater. They go up to the house of a lecherous politician of some kind where they abuse the tuxedoed company and set free a girl from a life of bought abuse.
The rest is a reveling spree up and down Paris, from lavish apartments and cobble streets to inside a theater. Zulawski always had an eye for exploring architectural spaces and so it is here. Cocktail parties segue in and out of orgiastic noise, almost everyone being indecent at one point or other. The naked body is offered and taken with a sense of dread. Characters flail and spasm as if something from inside the soul contorts, mocking or ruing this life encased in a human body.
Two male characters here are both surrogates for Zulawski. One the gang leader as director who stages the maddening spree around Paris, scoffs at norms, revels in revelry, who can't love the girl except possessively as an ingenue. The other man, picked up on the train, a hapless stooge - ex-pat from the Eastern Bloc no less - who wants to love truly, is sensitive and finds himself tossed about by all this madness, broken in the process of becoming a clown, also a surrogate for Zulawski.
In between them is the girl, gorgeous Sophie Marceau channeling more than a bit of Adjani, who is not sure of anything true and simply throws herself in search. "I live in the flesh, without pleasure" she quips. For near the end, Zulawski reveals the extent of the horror that pushes her from the inside. It happens with a film- within showing her mother's horrifying abuse at the hands of upper- class lechers. It ends with a hazy, mortified shot of Sophie watching through the bushes. The screen is then blow- torched.
The indecency, insofar as it's a genuine reflection of despair, I receive at a distance. It's certainly no affectation for Zulawski, in the way it feels for me in the hands of Gaspar Noe. Smearing it as he does all over the film however, the point threatens to be lost and probably needs to be salvaged. Hedonism here is then both the calloused emptiness of the idle well-to-do (both the cocktail- party and the 16mm film- within end in dehumanized agony) and the atavistic dance of the victims (Sophie and the man) as they struggle to shed the identity that partakes of that world.
Not being able to do it, as when later a countryside reverie with just the two of them in moments of secluded truth is intruded upon, he collapses back to that world for which he has only unmitigated disgust, a world of phony theater and politics (a phony revolutionary is staging The Seagull).
Some of it, as when characters flail and crow for no reason, is too much shouting for this viewer. But what I really wish is that he had been able to see the possibility of truly shedding that self, a life where the body is vessel for breath instead of a bag of skin that clings on you. There is no substitute for the poetry and love that come from respite.
As the most clear statement on Zulawski's love (and cinema) stands the scene near the end where the hapless man sits to be tied to a chair by her and has his face painted, before she throws him on a bed, in a ritualized enactment of how she has been treated by men, feeling herself on his skin. The swap of energy becoming intimacy.
This is all Zulawski's mad theater however, what he's been doing since the very start, there's nothing to outgrow for him. The film is someone who makes his poetry by throwing fine furniture at a fire, cackling as he does. The glow of destruction warms this man's soul, chases away the night. He burnt himself in my imagination once more.