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The Delirious Fictions of William Klein
The Stop Smiling DVD Review
(Criterion)
Monday, June 09, 2008
The Delirious Fictions of William Klein
Who Are You Polly Magoo? (1966)
Mr. Freedom (1969)
The Model Couple (1977)
Directed by William Klein
(Criterion Eclipse)
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
A textbook figure in 20th century photography, William Klein had a second career as a go-go moviemaker that remains mostly unknown. There is something to be said for the editing of posterity, but here comes Criterion/Eclipse with three of his efforts gussied up for reappraisal.
Born in New York City, Klein expatriated to postwar France at age 20 to become an artist. Returning to the five boroughs in the mid-Fifties, he compiled a portfolio of nonpareil street snapshots, then returned to Paris and a ten-year engagement with Vogue. He was present for the New Wave putsch, played art consultant on Malle’s Zazie, appeared in La Jetée and, as continental filmmaking entered its full bloom of recklessness, remade himself an auteur. The Doc Suess-ian titled Who Are You Polly Magoo? (1966) was his real launch as a director, a poison lens au revoir to the fashion world which burlesques the filming of a television documentary about a Brooklyn-bred model in Paris (covergirl Dorothy McGowan, basically playing herself).
Klein’s films may attract an audience through their acquired patina of kitsch — Polly, with McGowan’s Karina-Cleopatra bangs and its gratingly eccentric Dick Lester “inventiveness,” is a Mod time capsule — but he’s an enervating virtuoso. Scenes are treated as vessels for far-out sets, catchy compositions; once looked at, they’ve done their job, but they hang around on screen for a remarkably long time — it’s material better suited to be silently projected on the wall of a hip bar than really watched.
Mr. Freedom (1969) runs to catch up with the oracular Godard of Two or Three Things who compared modern society to “a vast comic strip.” In the zip-a-tone tale, a jivey-jingoist, chauvinist, racist, brattish clod of an American superhero/secret agent/salesman/motivational speaker in star-spangled pajamas and shoulder pads is dispatched to Paris to counter youth insurgency with pep rallies (Delphine Seyrig and Serge Gainsbourg drop by to help). The film’s caricature of the US was better encapsulated in Klein’s NYC photo “Supermarket and Fun,” where an off-camera toy pistol looms under a grocery display window listing bargains: shoot-’em-up and pushy commerce. Here, fatuous swipes at consumer culture and US hegemony are piled up, a litany of counterculture homilies reassuringly addressed to the longhair. (Klein, a prolific commercial director in the Seventie, made a far finer film about advertising in his documentary about Muhammad Ali.) Any given Spy vs. Spy or Rocky and Bullwinkle offers more insight — not to speak of visual wit — on the subject of Soviet-American relations during the Cold War grind.
Rounding things out is 1977’s The Model Couple, which follows two newlyweds moving into in a controlled apartment-terrarium, where they’re subjected to a regimen of inexplicable experiments by a research team. Inspiration from Savignac’s graphics, the Tati of Playtime and Trafic, and Woody Allen’s Sleeper are cut up in the hopper of Klein’s sensibility. There is some attempt to address the reality TV bonanza, maybe the only example in this set of this director breaking ahead of the curve — though the satire is scarcely any funnier for that.
