L'Important C'est D'aimer | Film Review

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L'Important C'est D'aimer ****

by Jeremiah Kipp on July 8, 2009 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

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Love, as defined by Polish filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski, is a careening struggle of misplaced desire, a doomed loyalty that's trapped on a death march into the abyss, or a self-obliteration to let the person you care for go free. The love is epic in magnitude as characters throw themselves wholeheartedly into their doomed romantic mission. But in the world of Żuławski, we're not in the realm of sentimentality; love is violent and obsessive and all-encompassing. L'Important C'est D'Aimer stalks its characters with the director's endlessly roving handheld camera, lurching through their Parisian apartments lined with bookshelves and into restaurants where glasses of wine and cups of coffee are thrown to the floor. In other words, this is a fantastic date movie if you're with the right company, meaning intellectually rigorous and emotionally charged.

With Żuławski, frequently accused of being overwrought, there's never a dull moment. The love triangle between a brooding photographer (Fabio Testi), a struggling actress (the sublime Romy Schneider), and her ridiculous, cheerfully self-loathing husband (Jacques Dutronc) is set within an absurd world of pediatric gangsters, sleazy porn merchants, suicidal clowns, theater queens, and in a casting coup that fits perfectly within the milieu, madman Klaus Kinski as a debonair thespian raging his way through the on-stage role of Richard III, though this mercurial actor's most explosive moment happens off-stage in his response to a negative press review. He picks a fistfight with two smarmy bourgeois onlookers, smashing their faces into the walls and floor before absconding with their tart girlfriends for the night. "You're crazy," someone tells him a few scenes later, and Kinski's character delightfully responds, "No, I'm rich!"

What sounds like an over-the-top Euro-art psychodrama is actually, by Żuławski standards, quite restrained. Most of the time, the characters aren't verbally and physically laying siege on one another—as they do for the entire running time of the anarchic 1972 period film The Devil and his 1981 horror film Possession. They are accompanied by a lush orchestral score by Georges Delereu, who also composed the themes for Godard's Contempt. There are close-ups of our central characters in moments of luminous stillness, such as an early moment of soul-encroaching vulnerability where Schneider, lying on the floor ready to shoot a scene in a Z-grade softcore porn film, whispers to Testi, "No photographs please…"

She is given the opportunity to act as Lady Anne opposite Kinski's Richard III, and when her nerves get the best of her and she flees from the theater, she is pursued by Werner Herzog's best friend. Who would have thought the most tender scene would belong to Kinski? As he comforts her with a gentle kiss, he not only compliments her beauty but, in a poetic gesture, states he would give anything to resemble her instead of being cursed with his own ugly, freakish form. When the photographer shows up to also provide comfort to the woman for whom he's fallen head over heels, Kinski contemptuously dismisses him with an indifferent flick of his hand.

Always drawing career-high performances from his leading actresses, Żuławski has been hailed as a George Cukor of demented cinema. Schneider, who embodies the very heart of this film, may deliver a performance that tops even Isabelle Adjani's wide-eyed, operatically shrieking madwoman in Possession. While Schneider's face is a document of what hard living can do to ethereal beauty, Żuławski caught her at exactly the right moment in her career. She was no longer a thriving young starlet, and while still a European icon with a glowing on-screen presence, there's just the very start of wear on her face.

Those signs of life experience on Schneider's perfect face form a kind of map, and while she's still gorgeous, she's also warped. There's something twisted inside her, buried incredibly deep underneath that lovely façade. The Cukor comparison is apt, since it's almost like watching Judy Garland during those middle years where she could no longer hide from her own true nature. And to her credit, Schneider makes no attempt to; it's a fearless performance not because she gets naked, in the figurative sense (the nudity is, in fact, quite chaste), but because she allows herself to be so vulnerable on screen, as if we can see every nerve ending, and the dignity it takes for a cracked-up woman to attempt working through her mania.

Director(s): Andrzej Żuławski
Screenplay: Christopher Frank, Andrzej Żuławski
Cast: Romy Schneider, Fabio Testi, Jacques Dutronc, Roger Blin, Klaus Kinski
Distributor: S.N. Prodis
Runtime: 109 min.
Rating: R
Year: 1975