The Public Woman

This movie might confuse and frustrate viewers and rightly so, for it's lack of discernible plot elements and objectives, but rightly so because Throughout his career Zulawsky as director is more concerned with making his viewers go thru the raw emotions, sights and situations rather than drawing conclusions or tying plots.

The key in this film is that everything is experienced thru the point of view of Ethel - a stunning Valerie Kaprisky - we are limited to what she experiences and thinks, and it is a very emotionally charged view, one in which only the senses and guts can be trusted ... to an extent.

This might be obvious, but the film also deals with a lot about sexuality, there is a lot of sexual tension throughout the film, right from the title and the first images the main force driving the film is the associative and intuitive.

The production is very detailed, and impressive in the sense that is firmly supportive of the history, I have always found Zulawsky a superior director in his choice of locations, actors, misè-en-scene, etc.

Finally it has a bit of uneven pace, and in the end this movie is more a feast for the senses than an intellectual mystery.

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 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.

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)

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!