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Sweet charity and the multitude of sins in New Hollywood, the square from Cabbageville and the courtesan who's afraid of the dark. The line of thought derives from The Big Heat by way of 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, so that even an al fresco lunch is charged with menace. A vanished Pennsylvania engineer occasions the investigation, the lead is a Manhattan call girl (Jane Fonda) introduced in the middle of a cosmetics cattle-call. An agent of fantasies, "a nervous broad," a proud thespian—the tour de force she's denied at the off-off-Broadway audition is delivered instead to the elderly john in a garments factory. (Her sessions with a psychiatrist are pure workshop, documentary snatches of Fonda hungrily figuring out a character's liberation and fear.) The culprit arrives with tape-recorders, the withdrawn detective (Donald Sutherland) is stoic savior and lost tourist. "Did we get to you a little bit? Us city folk?" The heroine's psyche is New York's to Alan J. Pakula, Gordon Willis gives it indelible form: The image is broken, hooded, choked with shadows. Loneliness rules the metropolis at the rise of the new decade (the counterculture's remains hide in the basement), the soundscape mingles shrieking phones, ominous footsteps, disembodied moans. Fonda's demimondaine navigates it tensely until the prospect of love with the dour knight pierces "the comfort of being numb," then it's off to the pimp (Roy Scheider) on his discotheque throne. Double lives and spectral voices, Charles Cioffi in his penthouse like Burr in Rear Window, the grilled elevator between Gothic spaces. "There are little corners in everyone which were better off left alone." The Beckettian rupture gives way to the vacant apartment: A performer's retirement, or a hiatus between roles? Russell's piledriving send-up (Crimes of Passion) comes in due time. With Dorothy Tristan, Rita Gam, Vivian Nathan, Morris Strassberg, and Jean Stapleton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |