Sunday, September 14, 2008
When High Fashion Met the Nouvelle Vague
Who are You, Polly Magoo? is the earliest (1966) of the three films included in the Criterion Eclipse DVD box set The Delirious Fictions of William Klein. I posted blog entries in recent months on the two other films in the set by this expatriate American photographer/director who was a part of the French New Wave, The Model Couple and Mr Freedom.
Polly Magoo feels like it was directed by some Richard Lester/Tony Richardson/Francois Truffaut/Jean Luc Godard super being in a time when pushing limits with the film form mattered. And was revolutionary even. It crackles with blackout gags, youth, and cinematic vibrancy of the mid-sixties where anything seemed possible. The biggest problem with the film is that it feels overstuffed with this kind of energy at times. Cinematic gags (an adult boy scout with a cigarette tries to cross Polly across the street) are interchanged with longer satiric sequences like the opening fashion show where models are clad in sheet metal constructions shown in a kind of bunker.
There are a couple of major threads going on in Polly Magoo. One involves a television documentary film crew that is trying to sculpt do a profile on Magoo lead by Jean Rochefort in a fine comic turn. The other plot line involves the love forlorn man child Prince Igor who is obsessed with marrying the supermodel. His room is a combination of Pop art construction, a boy's room and a playboy pad. His mythological country combines has a flag that consists of a split and reversed black and white target. Igor sends two henchmen into Paris to retireve the object of his desire and they are about as competent as the religious cultists in Help! who were seeking Ringo's ring.
Polly Magoo (Dorothy McGowen) is an unconventional beauty. She has an overbite, freckles and a kind of blank slate presence but still a youthful poise. She is a model who can be easily modeled. She is a convincing corpse in a goth fashion shoot and also a zesty majorette and Shirley Temple in one of the many fantasy sequences.
Dropping in on Who are you Polly Magoo is like taking a cinematic wayback machine to a kind of Goofyland destination. The whacked out tempos and disconnects can get to be a bit much despite their spirited fluidity. But in the midst of this film pointed observations are made about the superficiality reality of the world and its culture. In Igor's country giving someone your picture means you are engaged. One of the film crew members tells another "It's all surface. But Surface is reality too. That's life." Or my favorite McLuhanesque exchange between televison producer and Polly pursuer Gregoie and his collegue: "TV shows are better than movies. People watch TV absentmindedly. It's like life. People watch movies too closely. That's bad. There should be gaps. The little screen is one big gap."
Polly Magoo still has some pleasures, but it really can't be watched too closely. But fortunately, that is not a requirement to take a ride when and where the cinema was full of so much dynamic hyper possibility.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:15 AM
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