Alas, Zulawski-the-director again plainly fashioned his film as a caustic political allegory, and this time the brass got wind before it had even been finished, pulling the plug with about 20 percent of the screenplay still yet to be shot and destroying all existing sets and costumes. The crippled remains were assembled a decade later, with Zulawski narrating the details of the missing scenes over newly shot footage of ordinary Polish citizens strolling along the boulevard or riding escalators — a striking contrast with the '70s footage, which looks like Woodstock gene-spliced with the Zion sequences from the Matrix sequels. I found it borderline unwatchable, but fans of Southland Tales might have better luck.
As you might expect, Zulawski felt a bit demoralized by this experience. Back to France he went, and there he's mostly remained ever since (although 1996's Szamanka was shot in Warsaw and Krakow). His later films, building on ideas explored in The Important Thing Is to Love, frequently concern performance as a means of exorcism. The most intriguing is 1984's La femme publique, which in effect spends two hours teaching a very young Valérie Kaprisky (fresh from the Breathless remake) how to be a Zulawski actress, via a transformation that rivals Naomi Watts' in Mulholland Dr. He also perfected a device that I'm not sure has ever been given a formal name, which is the exact opposite of a shock cut — that is, cutting from something harrowing (an ongoing act of violence, a character in midhowl) to mundane placidity, not as a cheap contrast but as an odd sort of reassurance that such moments are just part of the natural order.
611 N. Fairfax Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90048
Category: Movie Theaters
Region: Melrose/ Beverly/ Fairfax
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I'm less fond of the films starring Sophie Marceau, with whom Zulawski had a 15-year relationship (which ended right around the time he stopped working, hmm ...), but even relative clunkers like 1989's My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days feature unforgettable moments, like a man presenting his beloved with two live crabs to use as a brassiere. I think that's a bit of French wordplay that didn't quite translate, as the film's hero (Detronc again) is slowly losing both his memory and his comprehension of spoken language. With Zulawski, though, you can never quite be sure.
THE UNBELIEVABLE GENIUS OF ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI | March 9-April 1 | Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre | Cinefamily.org
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