Robert Altman | Prêt-à-porter (Ready to Wear) / 1994

the underside of fashion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Alman and Barbara Shulgasser (screenplay), Robert Altman (director) Prêt-à-porter (Ready to Wear) / 1994

 

It’s interesting to rewatch a Robert Altman film from 1994 which received almost universally negative reviews when it originally appeared, from the vantage point of 31 years later, when that director’s cinematic legacy as one of the most significant auteurs of his time is pretty much established.

    The critics didn’t much like Prêt-à-porter, the English language title Ready to Wear added, one suspects, when the execs and distributors grew fearful that US audiences would stay away from a French-titled film. Audiences in the US and Canada weren’t convinced by the English title either. The film made money only because of its international sales.

     Altman’s films, with their fast-moving series of seemingly unrelated events involving huge casts of often internationally acclaimed actors who often speak quietly on the sidelines or are filmed in conversations going on simultaneously with others, with even those sometimes  chopped up and collaged, have never thoroughly been embraced by the American public. And, in this case, critics cited a series of what they felt to be failures: 1) The film “finds absolutely nothing funny or fresh to say about the fashion industry and the ‘journalists’ who cover it with a wet kiss.” (Gene Siskell); 2) “There is a difference between creative improvisation and absolute chaos, and while [others of his] films were delicately balanced balls that magically stayed in the air, Ready to Wear…has a haphazard 'Let's go to Paris and see what happens' feeling that wastes everyone's time and talent." (Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times); “Virtually everything that happens is held up for our ridicule, yet it's never quite clear what we're supposed to be laughing at. The characters aren't really mocked for their attitudes, their obsessions with glamour and money and style. They aren't savaged in any specific, observational ways that could truly be called satirical. They're made fun of simply because they're silly, trivial human beings—walking punchlines in a joke that never arrives.” (Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly).

     In sum, Ready to Wear was seen as a plotless mess without characters well-developed enough to sustain any real satirical focus.

     Fashion critic Suzy Menkes, representing people in the industry at the center of the film’s focus, similarly argued, “For fashion folks, the film just didn't come off—either as an extended skit, or as a bitchy or brutal dissection of the industry."

     I’ll grant that this film perhaps takes an even more of a scattergun approach to its subject than most of his other films which cover vast groups of individuals such as the US medical military services in Korea (M*A*S*H), the mythological figures of the American West (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971 and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, 1976),  the country-western music scene (Nashville, 1975), heterosexual marriage between those from vastly different social stations (A Wedding, 1978) the disappearing British gentry (Gosford Park, 2001), or the last survivors of radio entertainment (A Prairie Home Companion, 2006), to name only a few of his comic foci.

      But Ready to Wear is actually not so very different from all the others in which almost all of which one or several individuals suddenly meet their death which causes those surrounding them to quickly perceive their lives beginning to unravel, revealing to nearly all the others of their immediate society how empty and unhappy they are in their desperate attempts to seek, maintain, change, or redeem love, social stature, their ability to communicate with others, their daily survival, and even their ability to sustain their sanity.

     Altman’s works are never merely satires, a genre which demands a far sharper, meaner, laser-beam focus than his friendlier buckshot approach allows. Rather, Altman is the late 20th-century Feydeau, a writer of farces, without any attempt to keep to the format of Feydeau’s or even Moliere’s well-made plays. I like how critic Adrian Martin describes his comic approach, characterizing it as something that “floats like mist” throughout what I might describe as the vast battleground in which his characters fight in their struggles to maintain what I described above: love, social stature, communication and sanity. Martin writes:

 

 “Altman has a strange way with comedy. He is not into precisely timed visual gags the way Blake Edwards is; and he steers clear of the Woody Allen style of carefully crafted, rapidly delivered one-liners. Altman likes his comic mood to float weirdly above the film like a mist. It is a comedy of interactions, of behaviours. Sometimes this can create a quietly insane, infectious flavour, as in his previous withering ode to Americans in Paris, the underrated psychiatric comedy Beyond Therapy (1987).

     Sometimes in his comedies Altman will use a funny anecdote as the basis for an ongoing plot thread: we see, in snatches, characters doing something mysterious for almost two hours, and then finally some kind of explanatory punch-line. That is how it goes in Prêt-à-Porter with the endless scenes of Louise (Teri Garr) shopping for clothes in Paris, all the while making strange communications with her husband Major Hamilton (Danny Aiello) [whose character, a buyer for the Chicago Marshall Fields stores, who is secretly a cross-dresser].

     Altman stretches this kind of material out so far and so thinly at times that the punch-line can come as an anti-climax, an indifferent tag. Short Cuts used this kind of deflatory, anti-climactic effect in a very inspired and expressive way; it went very well with the general emotional malaise of everybody and everything in the film….”

 

    Accordingly, there is always the danger that the simple-minded viewer—the condition in which Altman places nearly all of his audience members—won’t even pick up on the final connection of events. In Prêt-à-Porter, several of the critics missed the clues. Writing in Newsweek, David Ansen, for example, asks “Why, having staged the humiliation of three high-and-mighty fashion editors (Linda Hunt, Sally Kellerman and Tracey Ullman) at the hands of a smugly sadistic photographer (Stephen Rea), does Altman prepare us for their revenge—and forget to show it?”   

     Actually, we do very much see the results of their revenge for Milo O'Brannigan having tricked each of them by snapping uncompromising photographs. Sally Kellerman’s character steals his negatives and forces him to negotiate with them, ending O'Brannigan’s career as a noted fashion photographer; at the end of the film we see him photographing a group of babies, evidently the only subjects now available for his formerly salacious camera.

 

    Problems of connecting up the pieces in an Altman film are problematic to any reviewer. And who can blame anyone observing the battlefield of this Altman film from afar with a cast that includes Anouk Aimée, Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Kim Basinger, Stephen Rea, Lauren Bacall, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Lili Taylor, Sally Kellerman, Tracey Ullman, Linda Hunt, Rupert Everett, Forest Whitaker, Richard E. Grant, Danny Aiello, Teri Garr, Lyle Lovett, Jean Rochefort, Michel Blanc, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Ute Lemper, Anne Canovas, François Cluzet,—not to even mention the cameo appearances of fashion figures and designers Jean-Paul Gaultier and Björk modeling for him, Thierry Mugler, Sonia Rykiel, Christian LaCroix, Gianfranco Ferré, and Issey Miyake, and models such as Christy Turlington, Helena Christensen, Adriana Karembeu, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Carla Bruni, Naomi Campbell and Tatjana Patitz, along with actors Cher and Harry Belafonte? Our eyes are so busy trying to connect up names with the characters, that entire elements of the constantly shifting narrative often go unnoticed.

     Is it any wonder that many of these characters become mere types, moreover, and that almost all lack full, old-fashioned characterization? Altman is not an old-fashioned filmmaker, happy as he is to leave out plot and often character development. Improvisation is his game, and only if the actors are up to the role he assigns them and are given enough screen time to delineate their characters can we expect them to transcend stereotypes of even their assigned position in the whole of things.

     At the center of this societal kerfuffle is the wealthy, elegant, and totally aloof beauty Isabella de la Fontaine (Sophia Loren) who happens to be married to the head of the Paris Fashion Week (the occasion for our massive gathering), Olivier de la Fontaine (Jean-Pierre Cassel). It is his sudden death—from chocking on a ham sandwich he is nervously devouring—in a taxi occupied by an unknown man who is presumed to be his murderer that sets everyone and everything in the film into a frenzy. Part of the frenzy revolves around the fact that almost everyone hated Olivier, particularly his wife Isabella, who blithely admits to the busybody detectives, Inspectors Tantpis (Jean Rochefort) and Forget (Michel Blanc), that she is delighted for her husband’s demise.

     The suspected murderer is, in fact, Isabella’s first husband, Sergio (Marcello Mastrioianni), long thought to be dead and who years before as a Communist in trouble with Italian authorities left behind the fourteen or fifteen-year-old Isabella and escaped to the Soviet Union where he has had lived ever since. 

     Altman and his co-writer never bother to fully explain why he has determined at this very moment to return to the West and reconnect with Isabella, with whom he is still very much in love; all we know is that he has contacted Olivier, perhaps bribing him with the fact that Isabella is still married to him (now named Sergei) pointing out that Olivier, accordingly, is guilty of bigamy. In any event, the two men arrange to meet up, Sergei purchasing two matching Christian Dior ties in Moscow and mailing one to Olivier so that the two might recognize one another at the airport.

    It is there, after a brief interview Olivier is forced to undergo with Kitty Potter (Kim Basinger) of Fab TV—whose Texas-twanged inane questions are the true connecting link to most of the fashion figures of the film—where he and Sergei escape in the taxi in which Olivier chokes to death.

    Sergei flees, escaping without proper clothing, having dived into a river in order to escape. With the death of Olivier he also has no place to live and no money, requiring him throughout most of of the film to break into various other guest’s rooms to steal clothing and, at one point, to take over a room itself until he can meet up with his beloved Isabella.

      When the two finally manage do meet and make a date which ends in his purloined hotel bedroom, Altman symbolically represents their past in an homage to film history, by evoking the striptease scene between Loren and Mastroianni from their 1963 film Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Here the actors momentarily take over the characters, until the now older figures (both actors and characters are brought back into focus when in her attempt to sexually arouse her now elderly first husband, she realizes that he also a dead man whom she can do without, particularly when he falls asleep in the midst of her seduction. Loren leaves a note beside his snoring body hinting that she has no room in her life for two dead husbands.

    Surely closer to the dead man was his mistress Simone Lowenthal (Anouk Aimée), who heads the house of Lo. It is to Simone that the members of the fashion world present their condolences, even though she admits, later in the film, that Olivier was a hard to man to love. Even more slimy than her lover, however, is her handsome but needy son, Jack (Rupert Everett), who not only is having an affair with the sister Kiki behind his wife’s Dane’s (Georgianna Robertson) back, but who has just sold his mother’s company without her knowledge to a Texas bootmaker, Clint Lammeraux (Lyle Lovett) whose head designer is the color blind Slim Chrysler (Lauren Bacall).   

     When the time comes to prepare for her runway show, Simone finds that her dresses, like the male suits and pants stolen by Sergei, are also missing from her racks, “borrowed” for a photo shoot by the new triumvirate of Jack, Clint, and Slim, who have hired the equally sleazy photographer O'Brannigan, I mentioned above, to accompany the boots, now labeled “Lo,” with which they’ve willy-nilly stuck upon her model’s shapely feet and legs.

 

     As I have already argued, there isn’t much of a plot to interconnect most of the rest of the vast cast characters. The rest are basically ancillary figures of the fashion world who we meet through their homage to Simone or the through the often banal questions and musings of Bassinger’s character Kitty.

     As I have already argued, there isn’t much of a plot to interconnect most of the rest of the vast cast characters. The rest are basically ancillary figures of the fashion world who we meet through their homage to Simone or the through the often banal questions and musings of Bassinger’s character Kitty.

   The black “street” designer Cy Bianco (Forest Whitaker) is the most outspoken in his hatred of Simone’s former lover. He is a gay man in a relationship with his male assistant, but who is having a very hot affair with the prissy fellow fashion designer Cort Romney (Richard E. Grant) who is publicly devout to his female assistant, but almost faints in a fit of ecstasy at hearing Cy’s voice in secret telephone recontres.

     Both Cy and Cort’s assistants meanwhile are seeing one another on the sly as well, all trysts finally revealed at Cy’s “runway” show held in an underground subway, where they all accidentally meet up in a subway car where each couple has been making out; there they are unknowingly stalked down for an interview by our endlessly dense Kitty of Fab TV who hasn’t a clue that with her meaningless banter that she is interrupting their mutual peccadilloes. 

   Completely out of this incestuous loop are two US news reporters, Anne Eisenhower (Julia Roberts) and Joe Flynn (Tim Robbins), both of whom are forced to share a room that Joe was just checking out of and Anne checking into when their respective editors called demanding more information about Olivier de la Fontaine’s death. Anne, wearing only a tee-shirt declaring her as the “World’s Greatest Mom,” has lost her baggage in Houston, forgetting it in an airport bar.

    While Joe is on the phone with his editor, Sergei, desperate for clothing, steals his clothes bag.

     In short, neither Anne or Joe have anything to wear outside of the room they have been forced to share. He phones his reports in, quoting from local TV reports by Paris newscasters, while Anne watches the run-way shows on TV as well. But then, neither of them attend much to their jobs since Joe soon discovers that Anne is a lush, the two of them finding their consolation for being trapped together in a shared bed. In fact, they are the only two lovers who are free to absolutely make love, being as they are locked away in a world apart from others while also knowing that after Paris, they will never see each other again, both presumably returning home to their married lives. It’s almost as if they were living out a Parisian version of the Las Vegas slogan, “What happens in Vegas , stays in Vegas.”

 

       Sergei’s desperate search for something to wear and Anne and Joe’s lack of clothing, in fact, become a strange sub-theme in this film that is supposedly all about dressing up in the most fashionable of costumes. And these three outsiders, Sergei, Anne, and Joe come eventually to represent the real world outside of the Paris Fashion Week with its quite ridiculous runway sashays and trots.

    At one point, these outsiders’ point of view is actually trumpeted out from the Paris fashion world, as Kitty races over to interview Cher at the Bulgari jewelry party. Asked the most empty-minded of questions concerning what she feels about the attending the Bulgari party, Cher improvises in a somewhat predictable manner: “Well actually I don’t think it’s what you put on your body, but what’s inside your body that really matters.”

    Altman claims that he found Cher’s somewhat inane remark to be the perfect link to his basic theme, which is finally played out in some of the last few marvelous moments of this film.

     Since Simone Lowenthal’s business and her new season’s styles have been equally usurped, she announces at the beginning of her runway show—where most of the audience in attendence is now expecting a peek at both her clothes and the new Texas boots—that her presentation will represent a kind of “circle,” a “closure of sorts,” a look into what may be “emerging.”

     To everyone’s shock her models slowly begin to stroll up and down the runway entirely in the nude. Only one, the very pregnant Ute Lemper, while also naked, is wearing a trailing bridal veil. Altman observed of the scene: “The actors knew, but most of the audience didn’t so I got the surprise reactions I was hoping for. Those women were wonderful. …Without that scene the whole film probably wouldn’t make sense.”

    To most Americans, apparently, his movie still didn’t make sense, a confusion and frustration made clear by Kitty.

    The Fab reporter runs out of the show to broadcast her startled reactions in what might be described as a kind of public breakdown: “Well, what can I say? Simone Lo has showed us everything. I don’t know if any of this will make it to TV or not…. She showed us like it really is. It’s so old it’s true. It’s so true it’s new. It’s the oldest new look. It’s the newest old look. Simone Lo as created a new new look for every man, woman, and child. And they can all afford it. It’s all the bare look. So hooray for Simone Lo. What the hell am I talking about? What’s going on here on this planet? This is fucking fruitcake time. Is that fashion, is it? Is there a message out there? When you got a lot a naked people wandering around here. I mean, I’ve been forever trying to find out what this bullshit is all about. You know what, I have had it. I have had it! Goodbye, au revoir.”

       Behind her, the crowd is roaring their applause in a standing ovation, all of them seeming to comprehend the message that the Texas bimbo Bassinger plays can’t comprehend.

       She hands the microphone over to her French assistant Sophie Choiset (Chiara Mastroianni) who basically argues that Simone Lowenthal is speaking for women and sending a message to women of “not what to wear but how to think of what they want and need from fashion.”

       While that is also not necessarily a truly profound message, it is surely an alternative to the representations throughout of how women should dress in order to appeal and attract other men and women or to demonstrate their social status and their sense of well-being.

       For, at heart, what most of the characters of Altman’s movie really want is to do strip off those clothes and crawl into bed with one another. If Roberts’ character certainly does look great in the designer dress she has finally put on after her suitcase is finally delivered up, she has spent one of the most memorable weeks of her life perhaps in a hotel bathrobe. 

 

     One has to admit, however, that Loren, attending her dead husband’s funeral in a black dress with a red wrap, purse, and gigantic hat says a lot about the woman wearing it. As Roberts in her Pretty Woman role of Vivian Ward might express it, “Wow, that lady’s got class.”

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

Jean-Paul Dupuis | Dansité / 1978

two bodies in motion come to rest

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Paul Dupuis (director), François Verret (choreography) Dansité / 1978

 

French experimental filmmaker and composer Jean-Paul Dupuis’ Dansité (the dance site also representing “density” or “specific gravity”) features two beautiful nude dancers, choreographer François Verret and Alain de Raucourt in a male-on-male pas de deux on a sandy beach among rocks. There, the two dancers play out soundlessly their relationship to each other as bodies, not unlike the sand grains beneath them, in terms of their magnetic valence and movement. These two men lay and stand immobile, fall, are pushed, pulled, intertwined, lifted, and crashed back to earth just as the winds play upon the sand.

    And there is both a kind seemingly ceremonial patterning, a complete randomness of the tumbles, and an interchange between the two as if they were magnetically pulled to or propelled from one another. If they often react in parallel conjunction, the two men at moments looking and behaving as similar and different as two grains of sand, they also are sent, in equal duration, scattering along the shore in momentarily opposite directions.

     As the 10-minute piece progresses, the continued rising of the two figures gradually seems to give way to gravity itself, as near the end one of the figures seems to be attempting to the pull the other up as surely the other is pulling him down. Eventually, his weight falls from its own gravitational pull onto the sandy floor, the two interlocked into one appears to be an intense permanence of non-motion, as what one commentary described—far more anthropomorphically than I have been characterizing these “bodies,”—a frieze, “staring at the eternity of the moment.”

     Interestingly, as they move towards stasis, the images also turn darker, with far less contrast as earlier images.

     But, of course, these are human bodies, and no matter that we might wish to describe them only as figures in motion, they are also two men physically intertwined in what can only be understood by the human mind as a sexual interchange. Their patterned behavior as opposed to their explosions of movement away and apart cannot help but be perceived by the human eye as the emotional reactions of two lovers, themselves attracted and repelled by each other. The détente which they finally reach, might be described as either the recognition of love or perhaps, in full romantic terms, the cessation of all search for another, death. It is fascinating that none of the short commentaries that I’ve read about this film bother to express anything about the gay sexuality at the heart of this work, as if in fact these beautiful male bodies were nothing but grains of sand or flotsam floating across the beach. Indeed, this might be one of the longest and most erotic homo-sexual encounters ever put to film up until the date of this work.

     Dupuis has made more than 50 films, short works and, most recently, longer documentaries, as well as composing music for theater and orchestra.

 

Los Angeles, May 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

Lasse Nielsen and Ernst Johansen | Du er ikke alene (You Are Not Alone) / 1978

a boyhood idyll

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lasse Nielsen and Bent Petersen (screenplay), Lasse Nielsen and Ernst Johansen (directors) Du er ikke alene (You Are Not Alone) / 1978

 

1978 was a particularly mean year for LGBTQ characters in film. In Chile, La Manuela, of Arturo Ripstein’s Hell Has No Limits, a transvestite, was killed by the one she most loved; the German transsexual Elvira Weishaupt in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year with 13 Moons,  ignored by the man she loves, slit her wrists before slipping into death; in Paul Aaron’s A Different Story, a gay man and a lesbian, both unhappy with their lives, fell in love and married into a heterosexual alternative; in Herbert Ross’ version of Neil Simon’s California Suite, Diana Barrie (Maggie Smith) was panic-stricken while lamenting her marriage to a gay, semi-closeted antique dealer (Michael Caine); in Arthur I. Bresson, Jr.’s Gay USA, the gay rights movement began to face their backlash in the form of Anita Bryant; in Alan Parker’s Midnight Express an American, convicted in Turkey for attempting to smuggle out a small amount of hashish, was locked away in a Turkish prison for 30 years, where he rejected the love of a sweet fellow prisoner (the Swede) and killed a guard who was planning to rape him; in David Hemmings’ Just a Gigolo pretty singer-actor David Bowie unhappily went to work in Marlene Dietrich’s male brothel; in Nighthawks Ron Peck made trawling the bar scene in London seem like Waiting for Godot; and Ulrike Ottinger’s Madame X and her female pirates killed off all the wealthy folk they found on a yacht.

    And then there was the light and breezy Danish film by Lasse Nielsen and Ernst Johansen, Du er ikke alene (You Are Not Alone), where nothing bad happens to anyone. True, boarding school student Bo (Anders Agensø), gradually discovering over the summer break that he is sexually attracted to other boys, is a bit nervous about returning to his all-male boarding school, particularly given the fact that his fellow students have transformed into suddenly post-pubescent heterosexuals who can’t get enough of masturbating to the magazine photos of women which they have illegally plastered across the walls of their rooms and, far more importantly, recognizes that the rector (Ove Sprogøe) of this Christian-based school is a strict authoritarian who seems to have forgotten, as their sex education teacher daily reminds them, that “sex is wonderful.”

       For a while, as he is greeted with the somewhat predictable reactions of hormonally over-charged young male teens who suspect someone in their midst might be a bit different, they gently punish him with pushes and shrugs, and even an occasional verbal taunt. Bo is clearly a bit lonely, a good kid whose very caring attitudes make him a favorite of faculty and other adults, while remaining an absolute puzzle to his classmates.

     Well, not really “absolute,” since so many of these boys have such long beautiful blonde hair that they don’t at all mind getting confused, once in a while, for the opposite sex, or simply sharing an off-hours shower. We immediately perceive, accordingly, that Bo is not at all alone, particularly when he soon finds love with a boy a few years younger than him, Kim (Peter Bjerg), who just happens to be the headmaster’s son. 

    Kim, despite his parents’ warnings, likes to hang out with the older boys around the school in which he lives, and so open-minded are the directors and their fictionalized student body that we hardly can point to the moment when Bo and Kim catch each other’s glances; all we know is that suddenly Bo is sharing his bicycle with Kim’s slender thighs as well as whisking him away to a secret hut of hay he has built deep in the woods; for his part, before we can even catch our breaths, Kim is shimmying down a rope each night and slipping into Bo’s boarding room bed.

     Obviously, if his father and mother got wind of the relationship there would be hell to pay; but Kim’s folks are so fixated on the horny heterosexual boys that they can’t even imagine, presumably, that there is even such a thing as same-sex love between two young boys of any community, let alone their own.

      Most of the other students are so nonchalant about issues of gender that they hardly blink an eye during a picnic outing when Bo and Kim gently tickle one another’s chin and blow gentle whiffs of air across each other’s body. Even though Kim gets drunk and arrives home to have face his unforgiving father, the reaction of the elder consists of more bluster than actual punishment.

       Nielsen and Johansen’s lovely boyhood idyll might have gone on forever, a bit like the long-selling 1964 softcore book by Georges St. Martin and Ronald C. Nelson (that apparently Michael Jackson kept on a bookshelf near his bed), except for greater perceived evil in this lovely film that threatens the status quo.

      A young student who has been ordered to remove all the girly pictures from his bedroom has secretly repasted them in the boy’s bathroom. When the headmaster’s faculty stooge, Andersen (Jørn Faurschou) catches a glimpse, all students are called into the little gym in the middle of the night where the rector demands the guilty one admit his crime. After a long wait, Ole (Ole Meyer) steps forward to be sentenced the next day by the headmaster and faculty to expulsion.

    This is the real issue behind the film’s title, as most of the students now refuse to attend classes while creating banners and filming interviews of faculty members and the more than ever flustered rector until finally, in a new faculty meeting, the adults are forced to drop Ole’s punishment. The boys have almost all stood with their friend, who suddenly discovered, despite his bad parenting, that he was not alone.

     Now realizing their newfound powers, moreover, the enlightened boys, upon hearing that the only real danger to their existence, the motor-cycle riding townies, have cornered Bo in the woods and are busy torturing and humiliating him, hurry en masse to save him. Ole demands that the leader of the cycling boys kiss his ass! Which he finally does.

      The final scenes take place at a of student-parent dinner celebration where Bo and others, on the advice of their teacher, tackle the subject of one of the Ten Commandments, “Love thy neighbor.” They do so through a rather amazing early performance piece, in which a young man is attacked and killed in the streets followed by a lovely long camera shot of Bo and Kim standing

half-naked in the forest innocently kissing.

      It is hard to know whether this short film-within-the-film is the one actually being shown to their parents and, of course, to the headmaster himself, or whether it symbolizes the spirit of some other such film; but whether it be the actual thing or merely a simulacrum, the point is made: sex and everything leading to it is truly wonderful!

      When asked whether the long kissing scene was always planned to be the end of the film, director Nielsen responded:

 

“No. We actually shot more scenes after the parent’s night film screening, where Kim runs out of the room after being scolded by his father. Bo and Kim meet down in their secret spot in the woods. Unfortunately, however, that scene turned out too dark and we didn’t have enough money left in our budget to re-shoot. So the new ending was created in the editing room. But of course it was always meant to be a happy ending!”

 

     In Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and elsewhere this film, soon after its release, came to be seen almost as a classic “coming-of-age” film. When it was originally shown in Denmark the censors classified the film as “forbidden for children under 12,” believing that younger children would not understand the homosexual theme. But even that was later lifted and despite the fact that it remained uncensored at all other places it was shown, it still caused problems for the directors, and even for me, when Google banned me and stole all my various blogs because I posted pictures from the film.

     Perhaps even the directors didn’t quite realize that it was one of the first ever to celebrate homosexual sex without the characters suffering pain and unhappiness, with often one of the couple dying, an amazing statement in 1978 and for years after.

     I think had this film been made and shown in the early 1960s my parents might never have let me attend a boarding school in Norway in 1964, where I might suggest the values were already very similar to ones presented in Nielsen and Johansen’s work. I might have easily “come out” at that time and been happily accepted; indeed, several males even encouraged my nascent sexual desires, but I was too much of a US product to even realize it was possible. Lucky Kim, lucky Bo.

 

Los Angeles, October 5, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (October 2020). 

 

David Hemmings | Just a Gigolo / 1978

paying for romance

by Douglas Messerli

Ennio De Concini and Joshua Sinclair (screenplay), David Hemmings (director) Just a Gigolo / 1978

A young German officer arrives at the front trenches of World War I just hours too late. Standing uselessly by the edge of the German excavation with bombs exploding all around him, the man, immaculately uniformed, having been trained in the best of German military schools, wonders if it is truly necessary to climb down into the trench. It is, says his captain. But that very moment the  soldiers around him begin to shout out, rising from their smoking hells to dance in joy. The War is over. The captain assures the newly arrived lieutenant that it is simply a piece of propaganda passed to his soldiers through Allied pamphlets. 

     In the very next scene the officer wakes up confused about his whereabouts in a French hospital room, whose nurses, doctor, and governmental representatives, about to celebrate his recovery, are shocked to hear him, having come out of his long coma, speak German, his helmet evidently having signified that he had been one of them.

      Now in full color, the film reveals post-World War I Berlin, our naive officer having returned home with a pig, half-covered by his long wool coat, in arms. So begins the comic-war drama Just a Gigolo, directed by British actor and child soprano, David Hemmings—yes, the photographer of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup and, later, in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella as Dildano, the leader of the Sogo underground, who long before those roles had sung as a boy soprano, Miles, in Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw.

      Before I go any further I should reveal the fact that the movie, one of the most expensive films of its day, in part because a portion of the original was destroyed by fire, was an utter flop which, as one of its stars put it, when the actors met one another today they covered their faces in embarrassment.

      As I argue in this essay, the film is actually quite fascinating, if not a fully successful work of art. I think simply by mentioning the cast anyone might perceive the problem. Let us start with David Bowie who performed as the German officer, Paul Ambrosius von Przygodski, described above. His mother, Frau von Przygodski, was played by the Austrian-born actor Maria Schnell (who in her day played opposite great actors such as Yul Brynner, Gary Cooper, Marcello Mastroianni, and Marlon Brando). Kim Novak, in her last film role, plays one of Paul’s elderly lovers. The great German actor Curt Jürgens acts the role of the Prince. And, also in her last screen appearance, Marlene Dietrich is Baroness von Semering, head of a bordello for beautiful young boys servicing elderly women, who sings the 1929 German song originally composed by Leonello Casucci and Julius Brammer, with English by Irving Caesar,  “Just a Gigolo.”

     Even the less noted figures, singer Sydne Rome, Rudolf Schündler, and Werner Pochath (who died of AIDS in the arms of his longtime lover, the chief choreographer and general manager of the Hamburg State Opera, John Neumeier) had notable careers. With such remarkable talent on board only something spectacular was to be expected. As Vincent Canby of The New York Times bluntly put it: “It's a very bad movie of more than routine interest because of the talent of many of the people involved and because of its literary antecedents.”

     Canby continues, suggesting those “antecedents”:

 

“The screenplay, credited to Ennio de Concini and Joshua Sinclair, seems to have been inspired, at least in part, by Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories as well as by various works of Günter Grass, including The Tin Drum. The production, directed by Mr. Hemmings, deals in all of the cliches one now associates with movies set in Berlin in the decadent 20s, everything from the first film version based on I Am a Camera and its spinoff,  Cabaret, to Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg, which may well have been made after the Hemmings film. Just a Gigolo has been knocking around, unreleased, for several years.”

 

      Finally, the last sentence of Canby’s review is very telling: “Maybe only Rainer Werner Fassbinder could do justice to the film's source material.” For indeed, just two years after Hemmings’ film was released, Fassbinder did indeed film a work remarkably similar, in some respects, to Just a Gigolo, his remarkable masterwork Berlin Alexanderplatz.

      Paul might easily be seen as a better educated and far more cultured version of Fassbinder’s Franz Bieberkopf (his last name, in German meaning “beaver head,” the name Fassbinder also gives to himself in Fox and His Friends) is a fool, a kind of Simpliclus Simplicissimus who in Franz’s case has just been released from prison. So too has Paul been released back into the Weimar Republic from the prison of war, and like Franz does not quite recognize the changed world into which he has been thrust. His childhood friend Cilly (the name also of one of Franz’s woman friends), the daughter of his family’s servant, has become a revolutionary of the streets, (who in this instance sings Bowie’s “Revolutionary Song,” written most definitely in the Kurt Weill tradition) in whom Paul, now “shell-shocked” as she describes him, has no sexual interest.

       Everyone, including his mother, responds upon reencountering him, “I thought you were dead,” as well might be given his complete aloofness to the suffering they have had to endure and his utter passivity to a world which now has no place for him. Just as Franz takes up selling shoelaces, the Nazi newspaper, and finally gay-oriented magazines in Fassbinder’s film, so does Paul take on a job of a human beer can that advertises the product. If Fassbinder’s “hero” falls accidentally with the future would-be Nazi Reinhold Hoffmann, so does Paul almost accidentally come into the clutches of the Nazi Brownshirt leader, Otto (Pochath), willingly sharing his bed for more than the cause that Otto espouses.

       After Otto demonstrates his complete misogynism by slapping Paul simply for talking to Cilly (Rome), the handsome boy determines to shift jobs once more, this time becoming the kept lover of Helga von Kaiserling (Novak) whom he meets at the funeral of her military husband as warring Communists and Nazis shoot it out in the cemetery where is about to be buried. Ducking down beside the coffin, Paul and Helga suddenly discover themselves atop one another and in their deep sense of fear and sensual adrenaline simply cannot resist one another. Perhaps we must acknowledge the influence of Evelyn Waugh upon this work as well.

       When one has already become a bisexual male whore, as has Paul, why not take a job with more money and less responsibility than the one Baroness von Semering offers? Besides, Paul has all the credentials necessary for the position: a beautiful face, a good education, and a complete lack of moral scruples; moreover, Helga has just taught him how to tango. Finally, even if you’re “just a gigolo...selling each romance,” there are all those other pretty boys hanging around at every party.

      Paul’s final party, an evening in bed with Cilly who has just married a Prince (Jürgens), ends rather badly in another shootout between the Communists and Nazis. Both sides claim him; after all he has already given up his living body to both causes. But as Otto previously declared, “we will get him in the end” (all puns intended). Accordingly, Paul unintentionally becomes the first hero of the Nazi cause that leads to Hitler’s rise.

          Thus, Hemmings turns in a rather sophisticated and often outrageously witty picaresque comedy very much in the manner, if not with the profound insight and directorial accomplishment, of Fassbinder.

        The problem is simply that Just a Gigolo has a few too many irons in its fiery expectations. The fact that Cilly abandons the revolutionary cause to become a kind of Sally Bowles-like cabaret singer before moving on to Hollywood stardom and her marriage to the Prince—if at moments seems charming, particularly when she sings “Don’t Let It Be Too Long”—may certainly elucidate the writers’ themes, yet her trajectory ultimately takes us away from the true focus of the film.

       Most importantly, as good as Bowie always is in floating through his numerous film roles, he’s hardly a good candidate for the passive role in which Just a Gigolo casts him. Bowie is simply too sexy and talented not to have the opportunity to belt out a song or two, dance up a storm instead of a tango, or, at least to let us watch him zestfully jump into either Otto’s or Cilly’s bed. As it stands, he is in this role after all just a kind of gigolo, a pretty face who has sold out his true talents to the lure of Hemmings’ grandiose cinematic aspirations; Bowie didn’t even get to meet Dietrich since she filmed in Paris while he picked up the glass of champagne she offered on a stage set in Berlin.

       Nonetheless, along with the wonderfully goofy music of Gunther Fischer, the jazz era renderings of The Pasadena Roof Orchestra, and even the stylings of The Manhattan Transfer, there is something quite wonderful about Hemmings’ version of the Weimar angst. Perhaps after these many years of dismissal, it’s a film worth more careful attention.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).