Never came poison from so sweet a place: L'IMPORTANT C'EST D'AMIER (1975, Andrzej ZulawskI)

The French love their neuromantic triangles, what's up with that? Well, I dated a French lady and I can tell you; they love what they call a cinq à sept (like Cleo, it means from 5-7): a pre-set tryst with one's lover on the way between work and home for dinner. Participating in this convenient and marvelous alternative to a conventional relationship can ruin you for all other kinds of relationships, specifically the guilt and "I can't understand why you don't like my friends" American ones. The 5-7 is very, very French and in films we have everything from Jean Renoir's La regle du jeu (1939) to Le Mepris (1968) up through to Last Tango in Paris (1970) to reference. Andrzej Zulawksi's third feature, the 1975 romantic tragedy, L'important c'est d'aimer ("The Important thing is to Love")  carries the torch of perversity with knowing references to all three of those aforementioned films, right up to having Georges Delerue do a kind of sequel to his unforgettable orchestral Le Mepris score. That's to say nothing of the film's acknowledged intertextuality, i.e. the ill-fated production of Richard III that centers the action, and off-the-cuff references to Miriam Hopkins (see: 'la reine de Menage a Trois').

In a career-capping self-reflexive performance along the lines of Norma Desmond's in Sunset Boulevard (1950), or Sylvia Miles in Heat (1972), French actress Romy Schneider plays Nadine, a B-list French actress, hanging on by her nails in softcore (?) sex films. She's can still look stunning in the right make-up and lighting, but Zulawski keeps her aging face plain and ravaged by strange, pale, orange lighting; we can see the lines of anguish in the corners of her eyes, the world-weary drag of gravity and unfeeling exploitation film crews on her cheeks. Nadine's also burdened by the knowledge that she'd be dead or neck-deep in a world of prostitution and smack if not for the "Zorro-like" rescue of her otherwise ineffectual husband, Jacques, an autograph collecting cinephile played with irritating impishness-cum-starry-eyed self-loathing by sometimes-chanson singer Jacques Dutronc.

He's Joe Gillis en verso: rescuing Nadine from the ash can and storing her in amidst all his stacks of LPS, stills, and film books. Their walls are bright white and covered in movie posters, the kind of pad that DVD collectors may recognize as approximate to their own, and yet! In Zulawski's vision it carries a stale, empty, even claustrophobic ennui. It's the den of a consumer, not an artist, not a creator. Reflected within the sad disconnect on Schneider's face and her husband's oblivious oppression, the posters become like prison walls.

We see all this through the eyes of a handsome, ever-so-tortured photographer Servais (Fabio Testi) who falls for Nadine after he sneaks into her Eurosleaze film shoot on his way to shoot gay porn for his deceptively dapper old pornographer uncle, Mazelli (Claude Dauphin).

Mazelli uses Servais' dad's gambling debts as a hold on Servais' photographic services, and even after they're paid off, Mazelli pulls a "just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in" on the poor melancholic sufferer. Servais and Nadine fall in love when they read the pain and emptiness in each others' eyes, bonded by their moral disgust and sense of self-degradation. They are two prudes in a world of porn, so they spend most of the film circling each other, bound by fidelity to their spouses -- a fidelity that is so un-French it needs special reasons to exist (Jacques pulled her form the wreck of a downward spiral and is "too innocent" to be betrayed; Servias stole his wife from another man who's since been drinking himself to death, etc.). Meanwhile Delerue throbs on the soundtrack like Contempt's kinkier younger brother, egging them on to the inevitable hook up.

Let us take a moment to remember that Paris (and Rome, as per The Romance of Mrs. Stone) has always been more cultured in the ways of non-marital love than America, and the figure of a houseboy/stud who depends on his looks and weak scruples for drug money needn't carry the same repellent currency it has in the States, where pretty rentboys (unless they're Joe Dellassandro) are expected to suffer more operatically even than Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8. William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, and George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany's, to name but three examples, all feel the need to censor their enjoyment of their special situation. They take the cash of their rich sponsors and no doubt provide certain services, but aren't allowed to enjoy their positions and keep our sympathy. They have to squirm like every dollar hurts their pocket. Mon dieu! Les hypocrites!

Zulawski seems to be sending up this kind of self-loathing and torment, albeit in a post-Sirkian way ala Almodovar or Fassbinder; there are also echoes of Midnight Cowboy's Joe Buck in Servais, a pretty, relatively unspoiled punk, clinging to the delusion that one can have pride without cash to back it up; adrift in a midnight world of sordid desire; in love with the sadness he catches in the newer performer's faces, Servais would like to forget that he borrowed big bucks from Mazelli to co-finance a a performance of Richard III just so that Nadine can play Lady Anne. Ever the noble, he insists the producers not let her know he put up the money. YAWN-ement! But luckily for us, that's where Klaus Kinski enters, and cuts through la bullshit like a knife through water.

As with the other Zulawski films that have recently appeared in beautiful editions from Mondo Vision, L'important c'est d'aimer's style is form-fitted to the subtext: voyeurism, cinema, the insanity that true art both requires and instills; the spiritual purity of over-acting to a surreal degree, and a little sex and violence so there's a hook on which to sell it. And so, the camera moves in an around actors, leering over their shoulders like a pesky reporter at a murder tria1. Often, the actors seem to be trying to get away from the camera, just to relax, they don't really acknowledge the camera directly, but they feel it watching, like a starlet on set might ignore a leering gaffer taping down the set around her.

In Zulawski-ville you can have you cake, eat it too, store it in the fridge, throw it away in a fit of pride and self-will, fish it out later and freeze it, all at once, but it's still not going to satisfy your cake craving.  His image is always stronger than the reality it services, like neo-realism reversed until it becomes raw blood, guts and modernism. As consumers of the image we're forced to reckon with the inescapable idea that baser arts such as porn make the higher arts possible and even 'high' by definition. Was not even Shakespeare once considered a 'low' art? It's only the dumbing down of dumbed-down dumbness and the changes in linguistic structure that has made Shakespeare a "higher" art, just as flowers can't blossom without the girtty, ugly, muddy soil and the gaffers who tape it down. It is what it is because of what it isn't (the basic tenet of structuralism!) Thus artists are always courting the bourgeoisie for grants in order to make art that criticizes artists for taking grants from the bourgeoisie. No wonder Kinski has to kick so much ass just to get his orgy on for the night!

When Kinski's character hears that the play will get the last part of the funding if they cast Nadine as Lady Anne, he suddenly remembers her from her last film, Nymphocula! (a Jess Franco film title if ever there was one!) which he remembers as "the one with two dykes in a castle with a dwarf," noting: "She was fantastic," he cries, "amazing!" Kinski's own appearances in Eurosleaze titles are not only numerous, but intrinsic to the form. He's the crucified scarecrow at the crossroads between genius and insanity, art and exploitation, raving anger and complete detachment. Both creepy and sexy, he's never a full hero or villain: half debonair aesthete, half orangutan. Somehow when he does these low-rent flicks his insanity keeps him grounded and he emerges unscathed from the carnage. The sane, however, remain permanently traumatized.They wanted to do Shakespeare and wound up in softcore porn; they're despondent about their failure. Kinski knows better: he brings the Shakespeare to the porn and the porn to the Shakespeare.

The key Richard III meta-scene rehearsed and acted over and over in the D'amier is in act 1, scene 2, where Richard woos Lady Anne as she mourns by Edward's coffin. Romy's not putting it over too well, so the director asks her husband Jacuqes to lie in the coffin, hoping Nadine will perhaps get some extra emotional punch for her performance. Tellingly, Jacques comments during the five-minute break, "I thought I did pretty well, no?" And of course, he will do even better--and help Nadine even more--very soon: his cheerful disregard for the druggy emotional nakedness of this kind of theater will signal his own death. His flippancy here is a punch-in-the-gut reminder to the viewer that we who are watching too are standing on the sideline, watching other people act or sing and quietly judging them. We like to think we're secret kings who could do this all super well if we bothered to try. We hate to be reminded that we're just watchers in this world, already dead, looking up from our coffins at the faces weeping down on us.

It's that sense of death that makes up a woman's picture in the classic pre-code Hollywood version of the term: fantasias of women running up and down the pole of financial success via a series of men they've manipulated and ruined, and maybe only really ever loved truly one... who was no good and had no money, and then they fall from grace and sleep with everyone in sight, except the man they truly love, he alone must stay a perfect memory, untouched by her corrosive caress.

Thus, the ideal lover is a dead lover, one whom no amount of licentious rubbing can denature. You can pine for him and think he was "the one" and hopefully, for your sake, he's not going to come back from California in two years with gray hairs and gambling debts wanting a "mommy" to make it right.

Where Zulawski takes a self-reflexive step back from all this is with Jacques' possessive insecurity taking on a horrifically babyish form: he's being forced to admit he never learned to fight back or to "care" enough (about living, photos and films are a different story). It's very difficult to know what to do when one is being cuckolded, or cuckolding, or breaking up a home. It's happened to me on all three sides at various times. I've learned to play all the parts, and that's what Jacques doesn't quite realize - it's an act. Resorting to violence is pointless, for any sensible or educated man, so all he can do is make snarky comments, bitter veiled threats, and--as I used to do -- spill wine accidentally on the guy's stupid hippie sandals.

One thing you can do is just dig that it's about post-modern Baudrillard simulacrum deconstruction -- i.e. romance inside a mirror, but that doesn't make it any less painful. In the end, Jacques offers a quietly unflattering portrait of a fan, hiding behind images and record albums as if a mother's skirt, afraid to look life in the eye. Servais, on the other hand, is a photographer and Nadine a model; they actually create the images that Jacques worships. They're validated by the act of leaving their mark for better or worse on eternity, even if their destiny hangs by such abstract threads as an early morning edition theater review in the local paper. The critics! baisez tous les critiques stupides!

Meta-riches are to be found in this film's DVD packaging, which invites you to luxuriate in fine design and cultivate your inner collecteur as you watch a film that savages the collecteur instinct. Consider the image above, wherein Jacques waxes ecstatic over an old photo of Miriam Hopkins while his movie star wife languishes stoically next to him leaving her left flank exposed to the sympathetic gaze of Servais on the right. Her hair pulled back to resemble Hopkins' in the photo, Nadine is radiating a benevolent calm which Jacques entirely misses, instead talking aloud as if to a rapt audience, announcing of the photo: "This one is going in the safe," indicating his preferred treatment (isolation) for all his pretty prizes. Poor Jacques! But not poor Erich, I have my memories, and a very cool DVD for the top row of my bookshelf--right next to Godard, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Romero, Argento y Fulci? N'cest pas? Do you feel the self-loathing? I am Jacques! Ach, wohin ist Klaus Kinski!!! Klaus, kommen Sie hier, bitte! Wir verrotten in der Hölle ohne Ihre Verrücktheit!