The Public Woman (1984) User Reviews

THE PUBLIC WOMAN does not give full justice to Zulawski's talent

[lasttimeisaw · 7/10 · 11 April 2016]

The 5th feature from the late Polish director Andrzej Zulawski (1940-2016), THE PUBLIC WOMAN is a French production, starring Valérie Kaprisky as a young girl Ethel, who has been chosen by the film director Lucas Kessling (Huster), a Czech immigrant, to star in his movie adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel "THE POSSESSED, aka. DEMONS", which is shot in Paris.

Ethel has no acting experience, it is her raw sexual appeal turns on the egoistic Lucas, he hooks up with her but finds her lacking in dramatisation and articulation of her character during the filmmaking, which itself is a constant jag of kerfuffle and chaos. Zulawski engages a freewheeling style to the angles of frame, which is navigated with ingenious dexterity by the legendary cinematographer Sacha Vierny, and he proffers us a close look of the process of making film in a crammed set, with slickly choreographed mobility and a hammy cast aggravated by heavy cosmetics.

After mounting a humiliating remonstration on Ethel for her incompetence, Lucas fires her and the narrative shifts from the sadomasochistic relationship between them to a new chapter, when Elena (Delor), a Czech actress, one of Lucas' mistress, goes missing, Ethel implausibly takes the imposture as Elena and plunges herself into a steamy relationship with Elena's husband Milan Mliska (Wilson), a frail, self-abusing (glass-chewing) young man who later will be involved into a political assassin of a Lithuanian cardinal and is hunted; thereafter, Lucas decides to re-hire Ethel for the role and she is sandwiched between him and Milan, both are driven mad by petit jealousy until one of them is forever out of the picture, and Ethel will finally triumph with a tour-de-force to show that an "actress" is born.

Being an art-house endeavour, nudity (notoriously for Ethel's two naked dancing sequences) and explicit sex scenes are indispensable here, which even leave a bitter taste of gratuitous exploitation; and we can clearly see the dummy in the sole car chasing set piece, a telling proof that commercial cinema is not such an easy piece of pie to emulate. But Kaprisky emotes beautifully from the taxing requirements her role entails, both physically and mentally; a blond Huster, with a haunting resemblance of a less delicate Farley Granger, is unwaveringly committed, but sometimes he is overbearingly tiresome; last but not the least, a young Wilson establishes himself in his early career that he can be madly charming and charmingly mad simultaneously.

Concocted with a little political allusion, a fairly firm buttress of female-empowerment under the patriarchal repression, an excessive amount of exotica and a largely madcap storyline, THE PUBLIC WOMAN does not give full justice to Zulawski's talent, although it will stay with you for its convivial self-awareness of its subject as the cast takes a bow in the last scene, it is a theatrical farce, but done with a certain degree of flourish.

maddening

[SnoopyStyle · 5/10 · 17 October 2016]

Struggling actress Ethel (Valérie Kaprisky) does private nude modeling sessions for photographer André. Famed director Lucas Kessling wants her as lead in his adaptation of Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed". They get into a relationship and a surreal film production. He recruits dishwasher Milan Mliska (Lambert Wilson) to be her possessive disturbed husband as reality and fiction blend into this unreal journey.

This is an unreal film. Kaprisky is sexually unencumbered and magnetically charismatic. She does plenty of strut-walking. She powerfully fills the screen. Lucas Kessling is an intriguing mercurial character. The surrealism is interesting at first but it gets maddeningly unreal. The wild swings and crazy 180 turns frustrated me. There is one scene in particular where Ethel faints and completely recover immediately with everybody ignoring what happened. It's a cheap kind of surrealism. It's almost student film level. Other parts like her nude photography is unforgettable. At some point, the weird surreal twists and turns bored me by their unhinged-nature.

"La femme publique" does not allow traces of subtlety.

[guedesnino · 7/10 · 18 June 2017]

"La femme publique" does not allow traces of subtlety. In fact, in fantasy or in the mixture between these two poles, everything is said or shown in excesses.

To the unsuspecting, it is the warning: the work of the Polish director Andrzej Żuławski is neither rest nor invitation to the contemplative gaze, nor does it want to be analytical. It allows, however, many reflections and moments of pure poetry, but its main characteristic is the disturbing, provocative, rebellious and critical figure about life and consequently about man.

"La femme publique" was made in 1984 with inspiration from the novel "Demons" by Dostoevsky. Scenes of this same healthy play used in a film that is being made within the film itself or what would be the main story "La femme ..." this use of metalanguage, which often complicates the understanding of the work, yields, in Counterpart, a valuable game that even equates the audience with the protagonist of the story, the dizzying Ethel (Valérie Kaprisky).

She equates in the sense that Ethel is a young aspiring actress who can not differentiate acting and reality, to the point of assuming the figure of a dead woman whose murderer is the abusive and displaced director Lucas Kesling (Francis Huster), add to this plot the A figure of Milan (Lambert Wilson), a Czech immigrant who is manipulated by the filmmaker (Lucas) to commit a political assassination. Among these three characters that form a love triangle that is never realized or wanted to be performed, we accompany the fears, insanities, challenges and impulses as archetypes of a fictional world mirrored to the real.

At various moments in the film, we feel as if we are as lost as Ethel, and as his character, there is no one who can give us hands, on the contrary, whenever someone arises we are attacked either verbally or physically, which establishes A very crazy game that makes us embarrassed, because when this game is fictional (that is being shot during the main movie) such aggressions are even well received, but when they reveal themselves in the reality of the lives of those actors, human beings, it is an aggression Even though there is a strong backing that we are watching a performance within the other, but again, as it is mirrored in real life, it is a madness and aggression common to human life.

Whether it's a recording set, a movie day, or the end of the movie, where actors like a theater revere the public's applause. In all these moments that mix reality and fiction, the palette of tones used in "La femme publique" does not allow traces of subtlety. In fact, in fantasy or in the mixture between these two poles, everything is said or shown in excesses. Because the traits are so gross, the moments of failure and the uncertainty of which world we are, soften this drama. It is interesting to note the theatrical references that accompany the director Andrzej Żuławsk, not only of theatrical authors, but in reference to theatricals like Brecht, with his political theater with ruptures and fragmentation of the scenes, besides the "I" narrator where the figure of the actor is Sometimes the intermediary of the author's ideas. Another theatrical reference is by Antonin Artaud is his theater of cruelty, where the actors look for in real situations and emotions to bring them and to revive them in the stage, like the young actress Ethel of the film, however, that is lost when mixing Reality and fiction.

Although relatively narrow, Zuławski weaves his own tale of political violence with Dostoyevsky. Kesling explains that he wants to adapt the novel because it is "a prophetic tale about those who try to change the world through violence," and strangely it becomes the incarnation of Stavrogin and Verkhovensky. Zuławski selects key scenes from "Demons" to include as the film within a movie and most of them have to do with political content. The scene at one of Verkhovensky's meetings is brilliantly filmed as a sweaty game on an indoor tennis court, where it is stated that "murder, blackmail, extortion, bombs" will be added to his agenda, and a list of people to be killed must Be drafted immediately.

The camera in the films of Żuławski is chained in scenes, advancing in the arrows and actively seeking the actors, most scenes of "Femme Publique" is struck by low and daring angles that make Kaprisky a species of totemic goddess or a lost soul in means To vertiginous and cavernous European buildings, spiral staircases and dilapidated columns. But this is also his most sumptuous film in terms of lighting, courtesy of the celebrated director of photography Sacha Vierny.

No longer the acting of the actors is the height of the film, but Valérie Kaprisky with its Ethel dominate the scene. If at the beginning of the film we have the young actress with lots of magazines of famous actors, the same happens with the consecration, even if fantastical of Ethel, stamping another pile of magazines, becoming the actress and woman publishes. Ethel's eroticism, through her body, her dance and her beauty, which is eternalized in this film and will surely be in the public's memory for a long time.

"The only thing to fear is God"

[chaos-rampant · 26 September 2012]

I love this guy, this madman and anarchist of cinema. I love him for the reasons he seems to vex a lot of people; muddled screenplays is the frequent complaint, hard to understand, extreme in everything he does. It is simply a matter of approach. In ordinary films, the filmmaker presents a more or less conventionally understood reality, and asks of us to penetrate behind the words and masks of people hiding their true selves, to get to something essential of emotions and dynamics. We infer from a subtle gesture, from a meaningful look.

Zulawski's method is one of shattering the clean boundaries of roles and framed narrative, all the things that keep us at arm's length from ever really feeling the soul of a character in our skin, doing so with impunity, so that we are free to swim and see into the inner world of urges and emotional thought, pure mindstream. What you would normally have to infer is up there on the screen. The skin of consciousness has been turned inside out, reversed: the pedantic details of all this having linear sense and plot are now beyond our reach, the actual battered soul is visible.

This is nothing to scoff at, in fact it is the most advanced dimension in film. Reversed innerseeing. Ecstatically hovering out of self and story. It is what Lynch only accomplished with Inland Empire, acknowledging the Polish influence.

Possession is sublime, the pure convulsing horror of a soul being torn apart. It was out of this world, everyone from Cronenberg to Lynch sat down and took notice. The story goes that he was so hellbent on that film to coax the raw emotion he wanted out of Isabelle Adjani, he did some pretty horrible things to her. Here is the followup to that: an obsessive, half-mad filmmaker (ex-pat working in France) torments his young starlet on the artistic journey to perfection. Their film is an adaptation of Dostoyevski's The Possessed (wink). She is eager, talented, but the murky depths of his vision escape her.

Everything else is madness, flailing, fluid self, the exposing of raw nerves in the frantic experience of the mindstream.

This seems murkier than Possession, because it lacks the actual monster and clean symmetry of doubles. It's in the same vein. Forces in these people are so painful and overwhelming, the characters have splintered into several more selves, and each splintered self is maniacally pushing against the limits of his narrative - some of them inside the play, others in separate subplots. Two ex-pats, frustrated in Paris with the hypocrisy of art and religion - one of the murders a cardinal, both are present in the scene, both photographed in a film-within. Two actresses, both mistresses of the same two guys.

So he is angrier than Tarkovsky. Has none of Malick's piousness. Ruiz and Wojciech Has are playful, he is bitter and mad. He sees ugliness, sin, impurity. And he has several rough spots, of symmetry and politicking, both shouted.

But he worships the same awesome god: not the cardinals' god, but the recognition of something that goes beyond the small limits of reason and self, and tries to awaken the vastness of that in his own narratives of fluid and battered egos.

And he has trusted collaborators on the journey. Valerie Kaprisky is divine, ecstatic dancer to the mystery of shedding skin.

Sacha Vierny, that mage of cinematic light; Resnais, Greenaway, Ruiz, Zulawski, he has enriched all four with his eye.

And if all of that seems gibberish to you, you should know of the rich tradition of Buddhist gurus called mahasiddhas, who used madness and gibberish as a tool for wisdom. A similar notion of desired irrationality is encountered from Zen to Dada.

The thinking mind is a meddlesome monkey. Confound, confound, confound.

Something to meditate upon.

WHAT an astonishing film!

[Stay_away_from_the_Metropol · 10/10 · 24 March 2020]

I am so grateful my girlfriend pushed this movie on me. Zulawski's POSSESSION might be my favorite film of all time, but I'd never seen a trailer for this one, so I hadn't yet thought to check out his next film following 1981's Possession, which is this, The Public Woman.

Now, Zulawski himself claims that he was asked to direct this movie by the producers who wanted to do an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel "The Possessed", but I am shocked to see that no one else has mentioned or inquired upon all the seemingly blatant parallels that this movie draws with Possession and it's production. There are endless details suggesting that the tyrannical director character in the film very obviously represents Zulawski himself, while the protagonist often seems to represent Isabelle Adjani (the lead actress from Possession). It's well known that Adjani had an intense and traumatic experience creating Possession, effecting her for years, and a great part of The Public Woman is about a director pushing a young actress to her absolute limits in an attempt to almost break or change her, in order to get the sort of performance he wants out of her. There are movements, sequences, lines of dialogue, and more that all directly correlate with this idea, then the fact that it's about adapting a book called "The Possessed" is icing on the cake. The French actress asks the director, "Why are you shooting your film in Germany?" This is all just a very intriguing element to me, and I love movies that sort of have this digging-through-the-4th-wall vibe by tying in publicly known elements from reality. The wildest part is that if this theory is correct, in the case of this film, rather than being an expression of catharsis as most similar cases would be, it's quite the opposite - a primarily narcissistic bloat piece which also happens to be artfully masterful.

Zulawski's signature olive green + puke color palette is in full effect here, and only he could make me love it. His signature camera work, often chaotic, claustrophobic, and sometimes even moving as if it has a mind of it's own - is all alive and well here as well. The stylishness of the filmmaking is cranked up to 11, but of course, the most important part of the film is the fully explosive and maniacal acting performances from the entire cast. The immense acting is what really brings the movie to it's own insane and legendary realm, and keeps it there. It seems undeniable that the director character represents Zulawski because there is no other explanation as to why we see acting performances in Zulawski's films that display a unique intensity that goes entirely unmatched. Every character in this movie is a monster aside from the beautiful, graceful lead played with grace, excellence, and almost inhuman spirit, by Valerie Kaprisky, who wasn't the original choice for the role and who was heavily doubted by the producers beforehand. They could not have been more wrong - Kaprisky is absolutely stunning and a complete force of nature.

The narrative will play with your head as it weaves in and out of a film production within a film - sometimes you won't know if what you're seeing is part of the film they're shooting, or simply part of the film you are watching. It doesn't get old, and it heavily adds to the surrealism of the entire experience. Sometimes it feels like the narrative is moving a million miles per hour, and sometimes it feels like it has you trapped in a corner so it can torture you for a while, but regardless it is a powerful one and it is a fully impressive and singular experience.

I've only seen 4 of Zulawski's films (the others being On The Silver Globe, which is one of the most challenging but impressive films I've ever seen, and his swansong Cosmos, which is one of the emptiest films I've ever seen), and although Possession is my personal all-time favorite, I think The Public Woman may very well be his most watchable in a universal sense. I will not hesitate to call it a masterpiece! Long live the Polish master.

Absolutely atrocious

[gridoon2024 · 2/10 · 30 April 2023]

One of the worst films I've seen in a long time, "La Femme Publique" hurls the viewer right into the middle of its incomprehensible "story", without any introductions: from the little I could gather, it's about an actress who gets into a triangle with her possessive, abusive director and another nutcase who gets involved in a political assassination (don't ask). In her spare time, she does nude dance shoots with a creepy photographer who apparently dies but comes back to life (don't ask). Andrzej Zulawski pushes all his actors into a state of collective hysteria, screaming their (meaningless) lines. And although Valerie Kaprisky has a fantastic body and is nude half the time, he manages to make the film totally unerotic and disturbingly misogynistic. The only reason I'm giving it a 2 out of 10 is that the movie-within-the-movie seems even worse!

Awesome

[songey2002 · 8/10 · 9 June 2011]

This movie might confuse and frustrate viewers and rightly so, for it's lack of discernible plot elements and objectives, but rightly so because Throughout his career Zulawsky as director is more concerned with making his viewers go thru the raw emotions, sights and situations rather than drawing conclusions or tying plots.

The key in this film is that everything is experienced thru the point of view of Ethel - a stunning Valerie Kaprisky - we are limited to what she experiences and thinks, and it is a very emotionally charged view, one in which only the senses and guts can be trusted ... to an extent.

This might be obvious, but the film also deals with a lot about sexuality, there is a lot of sexual tension throughout the film, right from the title and the first images the main force driving the film is the associative and intuitive.

The production is very detailed, and impressive in the sense that is firmly supportive of the history, I have always found Zulawsky a superior director in his choice of locations, actors, misè-en-scene, etc.

Finally it has a bit of uneven pace, and in the end this movie is more a feast for the senses than an intellectual mystery.

Very good movie, but apparently very hard to understand

[sarastro7 · 9/10 · 16 April 2011]

I am prompted to write this user review by the ghastly unhelpful two previous reviews here, which do not do the movie a single jot of justice. One wonders why they have bothered to comment, when it seems they have not even seen the movie in a language they can understand.

Naked dancing will of course attract some (in this case, well-deserved) attention, but my impression of the movie was that the whole "public woman" theme is actually the least explored of multiple other themes in the movie. The movie is about movie-making, and in turn about the difference between cinema and reality, meaningfully underscoring its point by being excessively melodramatic in its movie-within-the-movie bits (incl. the opening sequence). It is not a movie for obtuse audiences. The movie being made inside the movie is an adaptation of Dostoyevski's "The Possessed", which I am certain it will help to have read, although it is really being chewed up to an over-the-top degree here.

The Czech guy (played by Lambert Wilson of Matrix fame) is a snitch who has reported his dissident friends to the communist authorities, and subsequently become an assassin for them - one they intend to use as a "lone nut" scapegoat in getting rid of a Lithuanian cardinal who's getting too popular. This being Zulawski's account of his own role as a rising star in communist Poland, and what he imagines the authorities want to do to him (which is why he transferred his career to France).

This is a complex and unique movie which will stimulate and challenge intelligent viewers. The rest will simply be confused.

9 out of 10.

Gorgeous Kaprisky, but confused screen play

[Sigmund-3 · 20 November 1998]

It's a real shame that this movie has a such confused screen-play. We are acquainted to non-linear plots, but this one exceeds. Probably this is because the director himself performed as a screen writer, and so we often see shots that have a strong visual impact, and are tecnically impressive, but whose function within the storyline is unnecessary and confusing. So many elements remain undetailed, for instance Ethel's relationship with her parents and the underlying political conspiracy. And the mysterious bohemienne writer that appears twice in the movie... who is? And how comes that he is part of Ethel's background? At a certain point you ask yourself what is going on and what the movie is all about.

Editing is not always faultless, and there is some rough cut.

Coming to the bright side, as I noted above there are good shots, both for directing and for acting that is really good by all actors. Valerie Kaprisky who was then 22 old, appears gorgeous and dramatic at the same time. Huster and Lambert also play their parts convincingly.

Rating: *** (out of six)

Zulawski and Kaprisky in a nice slice of Gallic insanity

[lazarillo · 2 February 2007]

Andrej Zulawski's most famous film "Possession" was released more or less in English, but still barely made a lick of sense, so I didn't have much luck with this one which is so far only available in French or (in the version I saw)Italian. This may not matter though as much of the film is taken up by scenes of the gorgeous Valerie Kaprisky dancing around buck naked or having sex with various men. Model/actress Kaprisky plays a model/actress (there's a stretch). Her "modeling seems to consist mostly of her stripping to the skin and doing bizarre dances to horrid Europop numbers while a creepy, elderly photographer snaps pictures of her impressive torso. Maybe it's the awful music, but these sessions inevitably seem to end in her or the photog. having some kind of physical or emotional breakdown. Zulawski uses the same confusing temporal dislocation here he used in "Possession". In one session the photographer apparently drops dead from a heart attack, but in the next he is not only alive but apparently fit enough to go crazy, grab Kaprisky by the throat, and start shoving dollar bills in her mouth (and other, off-screen orifices)for some reason...

Meanwhile her character is also appearing in a legitimate movie (apparently some kind of costume drama). The director of the movie is bedding Kaprisky, but he seems more interested in trying to cause her to have some kind of real-life emotional breakdown for the sake of his "art" (ironically, Isabel Adjani had accused director Zulawski of trying to do the exact same thing to her in "Possession"). She also becomes involved with another crew-member who is apparently one of those vague French Marxist revolutionaries of that era (an era in which the US military was still protecting bourgeois France from all those "Marxist revolutionaries" over in the USSR). Naturally, a whole lot of pathos ensues.

Kaprisky gives a very committed performance, even if she is definitely no Isabel Adjani. This is probably her best film (although that's not necessarily saying much). The movie really isn't anymore non-sensical than "Possession" (in fact, it would probably be less so if it had English subtitles),and like that film it's at least not boring for one minute. If you take all that for a recommendation, by all means help yourself to this little slice of Gallic insanity.

Yet another incomprehensible, unwatchable, unredeemable mess from Zulawski

[KlaudiaKatastrofale · 25 March 2023]

1 star.

Yes: again we are treated to a mess of histrionics, arm-flailings, neurotic marching to and fro, screaming, agonizing and despairing, with actors "method-acting" what the director must have been yelling at them at any random moment, like "Show me fear!" "Show me anger!" "Show me agony!" "Show me madness!" and what have you, resulting in a string of scenes coming from nowhere and going to no better end. We may discern some artistic and political topics of the day, but as is usual with such pretentious egotrips we mainly see that someone must have been primarily interested in sex scenes with the intention of ogling the nudity of the actress. Everything around that was just a smoke screen to feign "artistic motivation".

. Many reviewers praise the leading actress Valerie Kaprisky, but we mustn't overlook the fact that they are all males salivating over her onscreen full frontal and rear nudity. It may be high time that somene had pointed out that this actress is just plain ugly ... when you care to look higher from her breasts.