Blu-ray Review: Alan J. Pakula’s Klute on the Criterion Collection

Criterion has brought to vivid life the darkness of Pakula’s seminal detective thriller.

KluteThough nearing 50, Alan J. Pakula’s Klute feels contemporary. The 1971 film concerns the intermingling of business, sex, and technology, which collectively offer people illusions of control at the potential expense of intimacy. Pivotal to the narrative is a tape recording of a prostitute named Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda), who, as she attempts to help a nervous john relax, describes what she enjoys, the boundlessness of her carnal imagination, and her desire to shed her sweater and become comfortable. This recording is heard throughout the film, suggesting a leitmotif, and it’s notable for being less erotic than lonely. Other recordings are made of Bree, ostensibly to help catch a stalker and probable killer, though they more viscerally suggest a need to experience a woman from afar without the complication of knowing her.

Though we see Bree at work later in the film, relaxing a john on a couch in a scene of remarkable intimacy and vulnerability, we never see the initial moment that has been recorded, which exemplifies our, as well as the stalker’s, remove from the encounter. Pakula intensifies that impression of distance by crisscrossing the aural and visual textures of other scenes. When Bree talks to her psychiatrist (Vivian Nathan), we sometimes don’t see their conversation, but rather images of Bree walking the street alone. Distance, and alienation, and anonymity, are also suggested by frequent shots of characters in silhouette, often against vast cityscapes. In the most chilling of such compositions, the stalker, a powerful man, sits high up in a skyscraper by himself, listening yet again to that recording.

Klute is set in a pre-gentrified New York City, which Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis mercilessly depict as a wasteland—a place of considerable yet fleeting pleasure. Another recurring shot, of characters in elevators, is framed from a birds’ eye view that likens the elevator to a cage. The streets are bustling and cold, while the interiors of wealthy buildings are symmetrical and sterile. Bree claims to hate her apartment, a comedown from her place in Park Avenue when she was a full-time, top-flight call girl, but this home is the film’s one refuge—sloppy, overstuffed, and authentically human. In the film’s most comforting image, Bree sheds her fashionable ’70s-era wardrobe and slips into an oversized robe and curls into a ball on a dining room chair and smokes a joint with a glass of white wine. Meanwhile, the rest of the apartment is shrouded in Willis’s quintessential use of dark lighting, suggesting that Bree is truly in her cocoon. This sort of comfort is what lonely people wish they could share with others but usually can’t. Not even someone as commanding as Bree, who, given her situation, has naturally come to see men as beings to be manipulated and bargained with.

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Bree Daniels remains Fonda’s definitive role, for having given the actress the space to explore nesting notions of how “playacting” can be used to efface vulnerability. Bree is very sexy—one understands why she would be in demand—but her bedside manner is only theoretically titillating, as Bree can’t give herself over to the charade. Watching Bree talk dirty, we sense a shrewd student parroting the answers that she know will get her an “A.” The johns, lost in their own illusions, don’t seem to notice the detachment that Fonda so brutally and beautifully dramatizes. The various cinematic clichés of the prostitute—heart of gold, schemer, pitiful addict—are nowhere to be found in Fonda’s performance. She gives Bree a diamond-hard sense of self-sufficiency, with a streak of cruelty, which is both elegant and heartbreaking, and every physical gesture contains multitudes.

Next to Bree, John Klute (Donald Sutherland), a private investigator who’s looking into the disappearance of a friend, almost feels like a ghost. We’re told little about Klute, other than that he’s something of a prude who looks at someone like Bree with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. Sutherland isn’t absent though, he’s actively dramatizing self-conscious withdrawal, allowing the audience to feel the emotions churning under a man who must be cautious in a world that he doesn’t understand. There’s something poignant in the way that Klute initially addresses Bree, as he treats her as just another person to be interviewed, rather than as an attractive woman or a prostitute. Klute is almost courtly, and Sutherland lances that etiquette with fear. Which is to say that this character offers a significant contrast from the macho P.I.s of ’40s-era noir or the badass cops of ’70s-era crime films, though Pakula and Sutherland don’t wear this progressiveness on their sleeves.

The mysteries of Bree’s stalker and the disappearance of Klute’s friend are easily solved and don’t make much sense. (One is asked to believe that a killer would bankroll an investigation into his own crimes.) Within this framework, however, Pakula, Willis, Fonda, and Sutherland offer a supple, heightened exploration of the perils of forging a relationship, especially as one approaches middle age and has more baggage to carry than before. Bree and Klute’s romance isn’t sentimentalized; it isn’t even understood as a romance, but as a fleeting hook-up rooted in each person’s barely explicable need. A sexy moment, with Bree’s leg visible as she climbs into Klute’s bed, is immediately dispelled with the practical exertions of what appears to be mediocre sex. Sensing Klute’s insecurity afterward, Bree turns the knife, saying that she “never comes with a john.” The true danger in Klute isn’t a killer, but the emotional traps we set, partially to subconsciously ensure that we remain alone. No wonder online porn is so popular, and even less wonder that the oldest profession continues to thrive.

Image/Sound

This transfer honors the visual textures of Gordon Willis’s cinematography, which offers many purposeful gradations of clarity and softness. Certain blurry foreground shots communicate the POV of a killer, for instance, while crystal-clear shots of buildings suggest the impersonality of the settings, and these are but two of the simpler examples of Willis’s technique. More complex are the brilliant compositions of Bree’s apartment, in which she basks in warm, softly lit comfort while surrounded by a tapestry of darkness that could contain anything. These compositions always seem to be perfectly balanced and are rich in information without ever feeling too cleaned up to suit modern sensibilities. Skin and fabric tones, integral to this film’s sense of reality, are also strongly detailed. The monaural soundtrack lustrously evokes both the cacophony of city nightlife and the chilling stray sounds of a long night, and dialogue is crisp and clean.

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Extras

A collection of interviews, taken from an upcoming documentary by Matthew Miele, discuss Alan J. Pakula’s direction, especially his gift for working with actors and the visual style he developed with Gordon Willis. Particularly noteworthy is the participation of Steven Soderbergh, whose own style has clearly been influenced by Pakula’s films. In a new conversation with actress Illeana Douglas, Jane Fonda frankly discusses working with Pakula and Willis, and still seems to be quite moved by the opportunity to have played Bree Daniels. Most memorably, Fonda draws a parallel between the backlash she braved as a Vietnam War protestor and the constant harassment that Bree faces. In a new interview, fashion writer Amy Fine Collins documents how fashion and architecture are used in Klute to establish character and setting, offering an invaluable primer on how the styles of the early ’70s informed the film’s look and feel. Rounding out a strong package are vintage television interviews with Pakula and Fonda, an archive piece on Klute’s use of New York City, and a booklet featuring an excerpt from a 1972 interview with Pakula and a sharp essay by writer Mark Harris that traces how the film became a landmark exploration of female psychology.

Overall

Criterion has brought to vivid life the darkness of Alan J. Pakula’s seminal detective thriller, which is truly a piercing examination of loneliness.

Score: 
 Cast: Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Charles Cioffi, Roy Scheider, Dorothy Tristan, Rita Gam, Nathan George, Vivian Strassberg, Barry Snider, Betty Murray, Jane White, Shirley Stoler, Robert Milli  Director: Alan J. Pakula  Screenwriter: Andy Lewis, Dave Lewis  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 114 min  Rating: R  Year: 1971  Release Date: July 16, 2019  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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