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That Most Important Thing: Love
Servais Mont, a freelance photographer who works taking compromising photos, gets fascinated by Nadine Chevalier, a tormented low-budget movie actress married to an eccentric film photo collector.
Release : | 1975 |
Rating : | 7 |
Studio : | Albina Productions S.a.r.l., TIT Filmproduktion, |
Crew : | Production Design, Director of Photography, |
Cast : | Romy Schneider Fabio Testi Jacques Dutronc Claude Dauphin Roger Blin |
Genre : | Drama Romance |
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Reviews
Simply A Masterpiece
Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.
This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
I thought that Pasolini's film "Salò o le 120 Diornate di Sodoma" was the best portrait of depravity I would see but this film exceeds "Salo". It is entitled "The Important Thing is to Love" because love is the sole good thing one can do amidst a world of utter ugliness where the sum of a man is "the ugliest things he can do".Żuławski has created a film replete with sadness, melancholy, grief and misery and it is crafted so well that it is dazzling and, at times, beautiful. He is well assisted by his cast of actors, including his three beautiful leads, and the film's composer Georges Delerue, whose signature tune haunts the film as a discordant plaint.The film depicts the relationship of a married couple to a man who becomes infatuated with the wife. They share the world of acting, film and pornography and each is a 'prostitute' in their own way. The husband, Jacques, is suicidally depressed and finds himself outside of life and not willing to enter life and engage. His wife, Nadine, is a broken personality who feels that Jacques saved her and she desires an acting career whilst making money as a porn star. Servais is a loner with a broken father; he has become involved with a porn/sex wheeler dealer, Mazelli, who is a gangster of sorts. All yearn to break free from the world they inhabit and Servais's plan, paying to have Nadine cast as Lady Anne in an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Richard III", seems a possible means of release. Like Richard III, the film's characters are somewhat deformed yet they are less ugly in their deformities than the superficially glamorous world they inhabit. Of course Servais's plan fails. Words attributed to Rimbaud, which are the final words of Servais's late friend who died from liver failure, capture the tormented pains of the characters:"Turmoil originated your poetry/ Immense forces served you/ Your entrails burst, death menaces/ Chosen City!/ Consume your shrieks In the deaf trumpet."The film's themes seem clearer than the characters and their dense opaqueness. It is a series of brief, fast changing scenes that I found jarring, perhaps the intent to underline discord and distress. It is like one long howl. It is powerful and almost perfect.
I just bought the DVD of this film and will never cease regretting it. This is the most awful Romy Schneider film I have seen, and I have seen most of her movies, including the ones filmed in Germany (Sissi, etc.).The 70's produced the weirdest films and I probably should have known better: if Klaus Kinski was in it, it cannot be good. But I love Romy Schneider and so I went for it.I will probably never see this movie again because I couldn't sit through this pretentious crap twice. I cannot understand how anyone could like this film. I didn't even like Romy in it, and that says a lot, given that she's one of my favorite actresses.If one reads the description of the movie plot, one is deceived as the story is not as simply told as described. I wish I could get my money back, but I bought the DVD from Amazon.de (Germany) - too much hassle to return it. I'll just throw in the trash instead and good riddance.
I'm not surprised to read here at IMDb that Romy called this her best work. She leads a cast of irresistible losers (Dutronc, Kinski, Testi) in the wholly believable debauchery that is so truly the amoral dilemma of the profession Maugham has called "THE show business". The physical electricity of these performers is such that I came away from it thirty years ago thinking that Miss Schneider was Brando's doppelganger. Or perhaps she WAS Brando! After all, they were never seen together, were they? If acting may be defined as the truthful response to fictional stimuli, then this film, which, by the way, must be screening daily in both Heaven and Hell, was perhaps shot in one cosmic take. These actors display - seamlessly - their bodies, their appetites, their loves, egos, ids and superegos. Never mind the sadness, life is for learning.
This is a film for manic-depressives or people on amphetamines, maybe. I have rarely seen such frenetic activity outside of martial-arts pictures, yet the story is simple: a woman tires of her limp husband (Dutronc)and tries to start up with a much more masculine type (Testi). The milieu is the porn movie business which Schneider's character works in, interwoven with the classical theatre world she would like to belong to.Romy Schneider got the Cesar award for her performance here; she pulls out all the stops to create this gifted but battered-by-life character. Pity that Zulawski couldn't craft a more balanced film around her.