"Lots of guys want to swing with a call girl like Bree. One guy just wants to kill her."
Klute is a 1971 thriller directed by Alan J. Pakula and was the first film in what was to be known as his "Paranoid Trilogy" of '70s films, which include The Parallax View and All the President's Men. I hope to cover these other two films in the trilogy soon. They all seem very prescient in this current, scary political landscape.
Although Klute is your basic missing persons/cop thriller with a sexy hooker angle, the vibe of the film is stunning in it's portrayal of a steadily declining NYC in the early '70s and the emotional detachment of Jane Fonda's Bree Daniels, the call girl who really wants to become a great actress.
Donald Sutherland, in his sonorous-voiced best, is the titular character of John Klute, a Pennsylvania detective looking for his missing friend, a high powered executive in Manhattan and frequent client of call girls. Sutherland also has an emotional detachment, an "all-business" vibe when investigating the case. He rents a room in Fonda's building, wire taps her phone, and shadows her movements, from auditions to clients. As Klute and Bree begin to fall for each other, Fonda's character admits she's feeling paranoid about being watched and followed, which she is, by both Klute and the eventual killer of Klute's missing friend and several prostitutes.
Microfilm, as a band, are such fans of the film that we wrote a track titled 'Inhibitions' inspired by Bree as a character and Klute as a film. It was one of our earliest songs and had a killer, lengthy moody remix done of it by Scottish artist Soundhog. It's one of my favorite remixes of our work.
Although released three years before the outing of Watergate, the film focuses on instances of secret tape recordings, buggings, and surveillance in a very dated and almost quaint way. Reel to reel audio tapes and peeking through windows are high drama in the world of Klute, but still the beginning of tech surveillance that would improve and grow in leaps and bounds every decade. Made today, the surveillance subplots would be more high tech and commonplace. Maybe this invasion of privacy would seem routine and if not expected, then not shocking. Would Bree's life be lived through her smartphone and business be done through a web app? Would her pad be furnished by IKEA?
From a tossed-off quip by Bree/Fonda in the film, she thinks her current, very spacious, loft-like apartment in Manhattan is a "kip" (a bed or room in a shared rooming house) and that she used to have a place on Park Avenue. As a part-time hooker? Simpler times.
Her place has a wonderful shabby chic vibe that Anthropologie would kill for; it's one of those lost, melancholy New York moments throughout the film where living in a pre-cleaned up Manhattan as a..."freelancer" was still possible.
Although possessing an overly plotted police thriller script, Klute has many loose moments of connection between Klute and Bree, walking Manhattan streets shopping for food or lounging in their apartments. And Fonda's monologues to her offscreen psychiatrist are brilliant, improv-heavy moments of acting that won her the Oscar for this role.
There are moments of lush beauty too, like Bree walking through the empty garment factory of Mr. Goldfarb, one of her clients. Striding through dusty air under a glow of overhead lighting Fonda moves in a slinky gown and boa, with the beautiful score by Michael Small of strings and hammered percussion surrounding her. It's wistful, slightly sinister, moody, and decaying, much like the world in Klute's NYC.
No comments:
Post a Comment