A Life Less Ordinary: Remembering Sylvia Kristel

"I continue to live off my name, a first name-my only role-Emmanuelle. In this use of me there is a mistake, an abuse, a total and violent conflict with who I am. I may smile, may act carefree and consenting, may continue speaking up for sexual freedom and asserting that in Nordic countries nudity is considered normal. But none of this erotic universe is in the least bit natural to me. I draw on inspiration, on my imagination, on other people's desire, but not on my own experience. I continue being cast against type, telling myself that I have no choice."

-Sylvia Kristel, Undressing Emmanuelle: A Memoir-

The news of Sylvia Kristel's passing came to me this morning as I was sitting in my living room, drinking my early-morning black coffee, and feeling the cool Autumn air blowing in through an open window.  Even though the news was expected, due to Sylvia's tragic health issues, I was still filled with an unbelievable sense of sadness and loss...and regret...regret that I hadn't done more to celebrate one of my favorite actors and film icons.  Even with my tribute site and all my posts on her great, relatively unseen, films I feel like I could have done more to pay tribute to one of modern cinema's great undervalued poets. 

Sylvia Kristel was indeed a poet..a remarkable actress and performer who projected more with her body and movement than most of our 'great' actors could ever hope to.  Sylvia was also a prisoner to her most famous role and this morning as the news is being reported all over the world it is the name 'Emmanuelle' that keeps being mentioned.  I suppose it is fair that almost all of the focus is on the character that Sylvia Kristel played for the first time in 1974, as it is one of the most famous characters in film history, but the career and life of such a fascinating woman was so much more than just this one character. 

 
While her life was filled with much tragedy and her film career eventually collapsed in on itself due to an ill-advised bid to Hollywood, Sylvia Kristel will ultimately be remembered as one of the great icons and figures of the seventies.  I have harbored the hope as well that eventually the remarkable string of films she made in Europe between 1974 and 1978 will someday get their due.  For a brief period, Kristel became the great muse to several of modern cinema's greatest auteurs and it is the work she did in films like La Marge, Une Femme Fidele, Alice or the Last Escapade and Rene the Cane that stand as her greatest legacy. 

Shy, reserved and haunted by a powerful loneliness all of her life, Sylvia Kristel came alive on the screen...her stillness, the way she used her body, the penetrating gaze of her stare broke through all of the self doubt and isolation she felt in her daily life.  It was this daring confidence she managed to project on the screen that made Kristel such an important figure in the sexual revolution and that persona that came through in the first two Emmanuelle films, as well as Just Jaeckin's supremely undervalued adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover, remains so incredibly resonate.  Kristel was a spearhead to the modern pro-sex feminist movement and her life and career are deserving of so much more attention and study than they have ever been granted. 

As the news of Sylvia's passing spread this morning I was contacted by several kind friends on Facebook offering some words of comfort, as I have never made my great admiration for this woman a secret.  One friend asked me if I had ever met her and I had to sadly answer no, although I have been told that she was aware of my tribute site and I have long suspected that she read, and possibly commented, on my review of her book. 

A great actress, an accomplished painter, an acclaimed author, an award-winning filmmaker and a great cultural icon, Sylvia Kristel was a really special artist and, by all accounts, a kind and generous human being.  I absolutely adored this woman and will continue to feel, to my core, that I knew her even though our paths never crossed.

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-

Truffaut the Critic: On Vadim's And God Created Woman (1956)

"And God Created Woman is a sensitive and intelligent film with no trace of vulgarity. It's a film that belongs to this generation: simultaneously amoral (rejecting the current moral system but proposing no other) and puritanical (conscious of it amorality and disturbed by it). Far from being trivial, it is revealing and completely honest...only the young will side with Vadim, because he sees thing as they do...obviously the film isn't perfect...but what is good is really good. Brigitte Bardot is magnificent; for the first time she is completely herself...And God Created Woman, an intimate film, a notebook film, reveals a new French director who is more personal than Boisrond, Boissol, Carbonnaux, and Joffe-and just as gifted."

-Excerpts from Truffaut's 1957 review. The full piece can be found in his The Films in My Life-

The Art of the Movie Poster: Satan Leads the Dance (1962)

The Art of the Opening Credit Sequence: Roger Vadim's Barbarella (1968)

Designed by Maurice Bender...

Overlooked Classics: Claude Chabrol's Alice (1977)

Before I say a few words on Claude Chabrol’s Alice (a.k.a. Alice and the Last Escapade) (1977) I should note that the copy I saw was a German dubbed print with no English subtitles. Not the ideal way to see it but the obscurity that has unjustly fallen on this lovely and strange film makes this version sadly the only game in town right now.

I have wanted to see Alice for around fifteen years, so it was with a lot of excitement that I finally got to view it last night. Despite the lack of subtitles and the fact that I can’t speak a word of German, I found Chabrol’s mystifying film to be a completely engrossing and memorable experience and I am not at all disappointed even though I had built the film up to near impossible heights in my mind.

Chabrol is so closely connected to the thriller film these days that it is easy to forget that the man has worked in nearly every conceivable genre. This is after all a director who has made more than seventy films with only a portion of those made up of the nail-biters so many think of when his name is muttered. That said, Alice plays out like no other Cabrol film I have ever seen. Dedicated to Fritz Lang and more than a little inspired by the literary works Lewis Carrol and Jorge Luis Borges, Chabrol’s film made me think of any number of Jean Rollin films while watching it as well as Robbe-Grillet’s L’Immortal and Malle’s Black Moon. At times it seemed like Chabrol was channeling all of the above while still amazingly enough making this very much a Claude Chabrol film, with his camera movements and framing being totally recognizable and not all that far removed from the long and languid takes in Le Boucher that I wrote on a few weeks ago.



Alice, centering on an unhappy wife who leaves her husband only to find herself trapped in some sort of weird and unending maze, was made right after Chabrol’s 1976’s The Twist, an odd entry in his filmography that would see him working with an international cast including Ann-Margret and Bruce Dern. Alice would return his cinema to a much more rural European feel and would team him with one of France’s biggest box-office stars of the seventies, my much beloved Sylvia Kristel who delivers her best performance here, with her work in Borowczyk’s La Marge excepted.

Kristel was on an amazing role in 1977, a she had just finished up working with Vadim, Robbe-Grillet and Borowczyk when she came into Chabrol’s world. It’s hard to think of an actor working for so many of Europe’s top directors near simultaneously who was granted so little respect at the time or since. It is easy to see why though as the French distributors always marketed these films, even Alice, centering on Sylvia’s past role as Emmanuelle. Ironically her most legendary role is the one that stopped her from the career that she should have had and one that, in 1977 at least, it looked like she was going to have.



Alice is very much Chabrol’s not so thinly veiled take on Carrol’s Alice In Wonderland. Kristel’s character is even named Alice Carol so it’s not like anyone on the production was hiding from the fact. Even not understanding any of the dialogue (which really hurts the opening and closing of the film) it is fun to pick out the many references to Carrol’s literary world in this loving and economical take on it where a busted windshield stands in for a looking glass and instead of a white rabbit we get a deceptively charming older French gentleman serving up a nightcap instead of a magic pill.



Alice worked best for me in the remarkable middle section where we are treated to scene after scene of Sylvia lost outside on a seemingly never-ending French countryside and then inside some beautifully strange and distorted older manors. Almost dialogue free in these sections, Chabrol’s camera follows Kristel’s Alice through an unending world of dead-ins in often wide open spaces that leads to a predictable but no less than thrilling conclusion that harkens back to Carnival Of Souls as much as the works of Robbe-Grillet, Rollin and Malle previously mentioned.



The film is simply gorgeous to look at, thankfully my copy was widescreen and fairly sharp, thanks to Chabrol’s usual cinematographer Jean Rabier. In fact, the same recognizable names that you see on many of Chabrol’s films are present for this rare foray into fantasy for him, including composer Pierre Jansen (whose music here has a wonderful nightmarish quality about it) to editor Monique Fardoulis. Special note has to go to Maurice Sergent’s production design, which is really spectacular here. Alice would prove one of the final films for the talented Sergent, who had done such memorable work for Ferreri and Buneul in the late sixties and early seventies.

The cast that surrounds Kristel is full of surprises and features legendary Silent film actor Charles Vanel, award-winning Andre Dussollier, veteran Fernand Ledoux and Chabrol’s own 13-year-old son Thomas, who gives one of the films most memorable performances.



I found Kristel herself to be as heartbreakingly good here as everything I have seen her in during this period. I am always amazed to see her described as a poor actress as I find her work to always be so subtle, vulnerable and downright moving. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the film’s one nude scene when she is seen staring sadly into a bathroom mirror. It’s one of the most empathetic moments of Chabrol’s career as he has her seated in a wicker chair (that is of course an allusion to her most famous role) but this time the eroticism has a bruising and sad quality…like his camera was sensing that she wouldn’t ever be able to overcome that famous role from Just Jaeckin’s film. The scene is totally silent and then there is a sudden noise that alerts her that she might be being watched. Instead of searching the house though, she stands totally nude and stares directly into Chabrol’s camera, aware that no one else is there and that is just the gaze of an out of reach audience who she, and her body, can’t ever totally escape from.



The film is filled with moments like that, although none perhaps quite so devastating. Chabrol loads the film with shots of Kristel’s own point of view and then direct shots of her. He’s aware that the connection Sylvia had to her audience was a strange and powerful one and he plays up to it over and over again…Alice plays like a poignant ode to a slipping icon as much as anything else and, in all of the film’s I have seen by Chabrol, I have never found his camera quite so sympathetic as here and it gives the film an added layer of resonance that is missing from most of his other lesser work.



I can’t even begin to fathom why Alice is so hard to come by. To my knowledge it has never been granted an official home video release anywhere. The fact that it is a Chabrol film alone makes its unavailability an incredible oversight, but add on that it is a truly powerful and haunting experience, makes its current missing in action status near criminal. Alice is, along with a handful of other titles, one of the great-lost European art films of the seventies.



I can only imagine what my opinion will be of the film once I do get to see an English sub-titled or dubbed version of it, since several key sequences are extremely dialogue heavy. The fact that I was so taken with this film even with the language barrier I think speaks heavily to the power of it. I can only hope that some enterprising company has the good sense to release it someday.



I will be posting more screenshots from this production in the next few days at Harry Moseby Confidential as well as Sylvia Kristel Fans.

Artist and Muse #32

Looks like BARBARELLA is another film getting ready to fall under the wrath of the remakes. I wish everyone would take the time and just watch Roman Coppola's miraculous (and little seen) CQ instead...
Here is Roger Vadim leading Jane Fonda around on what would become one of the sets of BARBARELLA. From the always great Cinestills collection.
By the way, if they do go ahead with the new version...I hope they leave Vadim's alone and just make an adaptation of the original graphic novels.

Vadim's Blood And Roses At Cinebeats

Kimberly at Cinebeats has written an extraordinary review of a truly great undervalued film, Roger Vadim's masterful 1960 chiller BLOOD AND ROSES.
Kimberly and I share an admiration for Vadim, and it is wonderful to read such a thoughtful and well written tribute to one of his key works.
BLOOD AND ROSES, possibly the best film of Vadim's career, is still unavailable on DVD which is really unfortunate. I highly recommend Cinebeats's fine look at this film, and hopefully one day it will find its way back onto the home video market.

Mondays With Jane Birkin

Jane Birkin and Brigitte Bardot's names are forever linked due to Serge Gainsbourg's JE T'AIME...MOI NON PLUS but unfortunately they only appeared in one film together. Jane was 27 and Bardot had just turned 39 when Roger Vadim's DON JUAN (DON JUAN 73, IF DON JUAN WERE A WOMEN) hit theaters. It would turn out to the final leading role for the legendary Bardot and would open to mostly poor reviews and a slim box office take in late 1973. The film, while not any of the players or director's finest, has surprisingly aged well and the dvd of it features a fine widescreen presentation that remains a great site after years of horribly cropped VHS releases.
While the film's most infamous scene features a rather tame encounter between Bardot and Birkin in bed together I am much fonder of the all too brief moments they shared throughout the rest of the film.

There are much better films to see with these two great icons, but Vadim's DON JUAN will always remain special for the moments when the woman who inspired JE T'AIME...MOI NON PLUS and the woman who made it a legend appear on the screen together.

The Trashy Movie Celebration Blog-a-Thon: Roger Vadim's PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW (Overlooked Classics)

Roger Vadim's 1971 film PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW is a lot of things: it is a biting satire of the sexual revolution and the youth culture of the day, it is a politically incorrect sexploitation film, it is a murder mystery and thriller, and it is the blackest of black comedies. It is all these things rolled up into Vadim's most subversive and fun film that remains, along with BLOOD AND ROSES, his finest 90 minutes.
Roger Vadim did himself a major disservice by writing not just one, but two books concerning his love affairs with Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Annette Stroyberg and Jane Fonda. By his own pen he successfully buried his importance as a film director by highlighting his sexual exploits with four of the most beautiful women of the century. Vadim will now forever be known for these conquests and the fact that he directed a handful of truly remarkable films is all but forgotten.
PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW is one of Vadim's most audaciously fun and serious films. Scripted by none other than Gene Roddenberry from a controversial novel by Francis Pollini it focuses on a series of murders taking place at a California high school.
The film opens up with a sunny California day and The Osmond's singing the Lalo Schifrin/Mike Curb tune CHILLY WINDS. The song with lines like, "Everybody reads between the lines" and "We're playing with your mind" is perfect slice of early seventies pop and also tunes us into the fact that all isn't what it is going to seem in the this film.
Shortly after the film's opening moments of young John David Carson's riding his scooter around town watching as girls pass by we are given a shot that clues us into the tone of the entire film. Vadim films two girls walking from behind and then brazenly zooms in on their behinds and places the title card right over them. It is a classic Vadim moment where he quickly points out not just what he as a director and the character of the sexually frustrated Ponce would focus on but also the audience themselves. He uses this zoom to immediately point out that the audience is just as fascinated with sex and the female form as he is and most importantly that there isn't any shame in it.
Later during the loaded opening credits sequence we are given an even more intriguing shot when Ponce flashes the peace sign to a couple of girls who laugh at him and then walk on. The sixties were clearly over by 1971 and this shot shows that the young people throughout the film are becoming less and less interested in the serious issues of the previous decade. These kids want to have sex, get high, enjoy themselves and think about as little as possible. Throughout the film Vadim intersperses classroom dialogue focuses on timely issues such as war and revolution but inevitably the kids focus continually returns to sex and matters of the heart.
We are quickly introduced to Ponce's new substitute teacher Miss Smith, played by the always great and delectable Angie Dickinson. This is one of her best roles and she plays the very 'helpful' and at times naive teacher wonderfully. Within a few years she would land two of her finest roles with the television series POLICE WOMAN and the Corman produced BIB BAD MAMA.
Ponce soon stumbles across cheerleader Jan dead in the boy's bathroom with a note attached to her bottom reading, "So Long Honey". This is the moment where the film turns really funny as we are introduced to Roddy McDowell's clueless teacher who keeps mentioning that Jan, "was such a wonderful cheerleader' and the even more inept Keenan Wynn as Chief John Poldaski. Mcdowell and Wynn are both incredibly funny in this film, Wynn especially steals almost every scene he is in as the well meaning but confused policeman.
As McDowell wonders how a murder could happen when the school's "academic averages are so high" Vadim introduces us to the films two biggest assets, namely Rock Hudson and Telly Savalas.
Hudson was just a few years past being the sixties biggest draw and after his brave and astonishing against type performance in SECONDS his box office appeal had began to slip. His performance here as the Guidance Counselor/Football Coach MIchael 'Tiger' Mcdrew is one of his finest performances. He is funny, charming and ultimately frightening as the charismatic counseler who sleeps with every teenage girl he desires. Savalas, seen here just a few years before his work with Mario Bava and as Kojak on TV, does great work as the homicide detective who is constantly amazed by the inept local police force and the sex obsessed students he keeps having to deal with.
Ponce, played very realistically by Carson, is a frustrated virgin who has more than a little trouble dealing with the opposite sex. One of the film's funniest lines comes early on when he proclaims to a questioning Savalas, "Do you think I'd do anything to a dead girl? I haven't even had a live one yet." Tiger decides to help Ponce out by giving him pointers on handling girls and attempting to hook him up with Miss Smith, who is so infatuated with Tiger that she agrees to 'tutor' Ponce at her house in the evenings.
Vadim has an amazingly clear understanding on what it is like to be a young frustrated male surrounded by beautiful girls nearly all the time. The scenes of Ponce walking around school lonely gazing at his classmates are extremely good examples of how to do successful POV shots. Vadim is able to place us in this boys mind during these moments and fills the screen with an endless succession of female figures and smiling faces. Bill Brame's editing his particularly great in these moments and he gives the film a fitting dizzying feel when needed.
The film reaches it's comedic and satiric height during the interview segments with Savalas and the 'maids'. Vadim really lets each actress shine here is small but fully drawn out moments that most films wouldn't have given much thought to. Particularly sharp is beautiful Aimee Eccles hilarious scene and the tragic June Fairchild's scene. Savalas looks more and more bemused and bewildered with eceh interview, he is brilliant in these scenes.
One thing that keeps the film so strong (and I think shields it from possible labels of misogyny) is the detail and emapthy given to the girls. Vadim and Roddenberry presents these girls as human beings, each individually well played and drawn. The film has a remarkable level of sympathy not just for Ponce's plight but also each girl and you can understand why they would be so drawn to the handsome and intelligent Tiger. It has to be remembered that this film is taking place in 1971 when the Sexual revolution was exploding but that the very straight laced morals that might seem extremely closed off were just a few years before this. The film suggests that the kids are within their rights to experiment but that they haven't yet learned to realize the possible consequences. PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW is not a condemning film of conservative or liberal thinking, in fact it is not a condemning or judgemental film at all.
The peace sign is again later flashed in the film in one of its most telling and chilling moments. Hudson's Tiger is reading Shakespeare to his students while Savalas watches and he slyly flashes him the peace sign. It is a great moment in a film filled with them, the two understand each other and they ultimately both understand how futile the gesture has become.
....SPOILER ALERT.....................................................................................................................................................................................
It is pretty apparent early on that Hudson's Tiger is the killer, what isn't known though is how the film is going to play out. The last ten minutes are among the finest that Vadim ever directed. There is aneffective dialogue scene in a car where Ponce and Tiger discuss the murders. Ponce knows Tiger is guilty and Tiger knows that Ponce has found him out. Vadim brilliantly uses some flash forwarding here of Tiger attempting to strangle Ponce and then Ponce running away. We, as an audience, expect the scene to play out this way but Vadim quickly shows that we are once again seeing things from Ponce's point of view, we are seeing the future played out in his mind and not as it really is. Hudson is brilliantly chilling in this scene and when he says that he made a horrible mistake killing Jan we believe him.
The film ends ambiguously with Savalas discovering on oversees plane ticket in Barabara Leighs (Tiger's wife) purse suggesting that Tiger isn't in fact dead but has escaped completely. Savalas gives a brilliant closing look that suggests he is done with the case no matter what the 'truth' might be. Ponce in the mean time has learned much from Tiger and the film ends with him driving beautiful June Fairchild off on his bike and a revamped faster CHILLY WINDS plays the film to darkness.

PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW won't go away. It often mentioned among the great missing dvds and Tarantino recently featured it at his Grindhouse film festival. Turner Classic Movies has even shown it a couple of times. I think the reason it still hasn't found a home on DVD is because it does deal with underage sexuality. America has a hard time with that subject and this film could turn a lot more heads now than perhaps it did in the more open period of the early seventies. One would be hard pressed to imagine a remake, even in our present remake crazed cinemas.

The cast would all have varied careers after the film opened up to lukewarm reviews and box office. June Fairchild would only appear in a handful of films after this but would immeasurably add to all of them, she was tragically reported in 2002 to being homeless. I hope things have turned around for her. Many of the other 'maids' would find minor success throughout their respective careers.
Dickinson, as mentioned, soon found herself in a popular tv series and still lights up the screen to this day. Brian DePalma would give her one of her great roles less than a decade after PRETTY MAIDS in DRESSED TO KILL. Savalas would also soon become a television icon and he is loved by genre and film fans all over the world.
Rock Hudson never got his due. A fine actor and a reportedly warm and giving man whose career was hampered first by an image forced on him and then by personal tragedy. PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW remains one of his finest roles and the guy in my book will always be one of the great ones.

Vadim's career is frustrating after PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW. Some memorably flawed films such as the last Bardot collaboration, DON JUAN IS A WOMAN and the underrated Sylvia Kristel film GAME OF SEDUCTION are mixed in with some truly unfortunate productions like NIGHT GAMES and the ill-advised AND GOD CREATED WOMAN remake. He died in 2000 and most of the obituaries focused on the female leads of his life and work. A career that features films as good as PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW, BLOOD AND ROSES, LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES, and WARRIOR's REST is in serious need of reappraisal.

PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW is one of my favorite films of one of American cinema's greatest years. It is a proudly un pc sexploitation, thriller, comedy, murder mystery whose time has come. Search it out.

A Warm Day In New York, April 1971.

Later today I am going to be posting a review to go along with The Bleeding Tree's The Trashy Movie Celebration Blog-a-thon that I heard about from the always great Cinebeats. I had several films in mind and finally decided on either Jess Franco's delightful CELESTINE with Lina Romay or Roger Vadim's 1971 gem PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW.
I have decided on the Vadim flick as I am ultimately more familiar with it and since it was featured at Tarantino's recent Grindhouse festival it seemed more timely.
Here I offer a few ads you would have seen had you lived in the Big Apple and opened up the Times in 1971.
How amazing would it have been to spend a weekend viewing films from directors ranging from Vadim to Casavettes to Van Peebles to Bertolucci? You could have done a double feature with one of the greatest art films ever THE CONFORMIST and the great Amicus anthology THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD. Want some comedy and sex? How about Woody Allen's BANANAS paired up with the X-rated SEXUS IN PARADISE? How about some SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG with SAMURAI PART 1.
If they ever build a time machine, 1971 doesn't seem like a bad year for a movie lover to set the dial to.

My PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW review will be up later today.