A Man Called Destruction: The Apocalyptic Male Gaze Of Andrzej Zulawski

Sophie Marceau and Tchéky Karo, L’amour braque, 1985

When a great artist dies, among the (sin­cere) brom­ides offered in trib­ute is “He/she will be missed.” With the Polish film­maker Andrzej Zulawski, that idea does­n’t auto­mat­ic­ally apply, only because the films he made were so relent­lessly sin­gu­lar and extreme and unlike any­thing else that it’s still dif­fi­cult to actu­ally believe they exist. So nev­er mind miss­ing him—as it hap­pens, Cosmos, his first movie after a fifteen-year absence from film­mak­ing, just had its first screen­ing in New York and has been picked up for U.S. dis­tri­bu­tion by Kino Lorber—it’ll take years of view­ing and re-viewing just to assim­il­ate him, if that’s at all pos­sible. The thir­teen fea­tures and two shorts he com­pleted between 1969 and 2015 may not be “enough,” but they are an awful lot. 

When I learned of his death, I was laid up with an ail­ment that made move­ment rather chal­len­ging, and cer­tain types of con­cen­tra­tion per­haps more so; with some res­ult­ant unasked-for time on my hands, I decided to check out three films that sur­round, tem­por­ally, his most fam­ous film world­wide, the notori­ous 1981 Possession. As was the case for many American cinephiles of a cer­tain age, Possession, in a ridicu­lously edited U.S. home video release cobbled togeth­er for the Extreme Horror mar­ket, was my first expos­ure to Zulawski, and it cer­tainly did make an impres­sion. I was not entirely sur­prised, trawl­ing the Internet for writ­ing on the maes­tro, to learn that the film’s repu­ta­tion as a genre film has exas­per­ated some of our most exact­ing hier­archy mind­ers, for instance the crit­ic­al entity known as The Ferroni Brigade, who wrote in the intro to their 2012 inter­view with Zulaski: “Although asso­ci­ated with a vis­cer­al, trem­bling style and lam­ent­ably com­part­ment­al­ized for his most lur­id ideas—like the hor­ror creature Isabelle Adjani shacks up with in Possession (1981)—Żuławski’s work teems with the invent­ive­ness of a highly cul­tured man, res­ult­ing in a pro­voc­at­ive mix of big ideas and emo­tion­al tor­rents (mirrored in the dir­ect­or’s decision to mostly reject con­ven­tion­al explan­a­tions, while con­vey­ing the themes with a pain­ful and ecstat­ic naked­ness, fre­quently extend­ing to his female prot­ag­on­ists).” Now I don’t want to bag on these guys like it’s late 2009 or any­thing, but that “fre­quently extend­ing to his female prot­ag­on­ists” strikes me as more than a touch coy. We’ll get to that. 

One cru­cial thing I dis­covered in revis­it­ing 1975’s L’important de c’est d’aim­er, 1984’s La femme pub­lique, and 1985’s L’amour braque is that, absence of Possession’s Lovecraftian fifth-dimensional sex octopus not­with­stand­ing, not one of the films is sub­stan­tially less lur­id than Possession—indeed, in a sense L’amour braque may beat it by sev­er­al lengths—and that all of them are more or less the same film. And they are all films which, in spite of their let­ting each of their female leads fly their freak flags high and wide—or per­haps I should say, giv­ing their female leads the oppor­tun­ity to explore new and bold and unrepressed aven­ues of free expression—indulge in a pretty ret­ro­grade per­spect­ive on gender dynam­ics and/or rela­tions. In each of the films, with this being LEAST the case in L’important, which is the only film of the batch with no basis in 19^th-century Russian lit­er­at­ure, the con­cep­tion of woman is very Baudelaire High Romantic, with an early exit ramp on to amour fou Surrealism. 

Woman—and all the bet­ter if she is young, proud, newly nubile woman (and again, in L’important the stress is slightly askew because the female lead is Romy Schneider, obvi­ously beau­ti­ful but nearly 40 at the time of shoot­ing and maybe play­ing someone who’d BEEN a lead in a Zulawski movie much earli­er in her life) is both the vital life force and the des­troy­er of souls. Man is so flum­moxed by Woman that he is lit­er­ally divided by her. (“None of which equals the poison/welling up in your eyes/that show me my poor soul reversed…”—Baudelaire, “Poison,” trans­la­tion Richard Howard.) All of these movies are ostens­ibly love tri­angles but really, the males “com­pet­ing” for Woman’s love, such as it is, are twins albeit not doppelgangers—doppelgangers do show up to make a kind of peace, as in Possession—and the con­flict between them is just the MAIN con­flict tak­ing place with­in Man him­self. Woman, tor­men­ted by doubt and self-loathing, can­not be fully REALIZED without Man sac­ri­fi­cing Himself, allow­ing Himself to empty Herself into Him, and out of what He receives from Her, He shall create/destroy, create/destroy, create/destroy until some­body, most likely Him, just can­not take it anymore. 

In the world view of these four Zulawski movies, there is one thing no Man, not even the most Highly Cultured Man, is immune to, and that thing is the name of Bongwater’s third LP.

Michel Robin, who has his books, and his poetry to pro­tect him, in L’important c’est d’aim­er (1975)

Given these cir­cum­stances, I don’t think it’s unfair to note that these Zulawski films are steered by a male gaze, but that they’re steered by a nearly vehe­ment male gaze. Vehement as in obsess­ive, mind you, not neces­sar­ily malevol­ent. It’s amaz­ing to see in film after film how Zulawski goes back to cer­tain key, or you could say sem­in­al images when con­sid­er­ing his male prot­ag­on­ists: the blood on the face, the affected/infected eyes (at the end of L’amour braque the Prince Myshkin fig­ure of the story has on sim­il­ar yellow-eye con­tacts to Sam Neill’s in Possession) and these sig­ni­fi­ers have a cer­tain cor­rel­at­ive in the per­fect groom­ing he gives to Valerie Kaprisky in La femme pub­lique and par­tic­u­larly Sophie Marceau in L’amour braque, their first film together. 

Valerie Kaprisky

Sophie Marceau

“Is she an intel­lec­tu­al?” “No, an act­ress.” That’s an exchange from L’important, and in both La femme pub­lique and L’amour braque a man­ic divided male (played in the former film by Francis Huster, in the lat­ter by Tchéky Karo) will call the female lead his “star.“All of these movies are about movie­mak­ing, and L’amour braque is pos­sibly the most auda­cious in this respect, not least in its cast­ing of Marceau, who was just about at the end of her run as French cinema’s answer to Molly Ringwald at the time. Here she struts about and vamps it up and screams “I des­troy everything I love” and just gen­er­ally CANNOT BE CONTAINED. It is, I sup­pose, the ines­cap­able prim­al aspect of the female per­form­ances in these movies that, mul­tiple allu­sions to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov not­with­stand­ing, leads to their mis­ap­pre­hen­sion in the CineBroverse as, to bor­row a phrase from a dis­gus­ted friend, “Emo break­up movies.” (See here.)

It’s worth remem­ber­ing also that the allus­ive­ness stretches every which way. L’amour braque, rather sur­pris­ingly, hits almost every actu­al plot point from The Idiot while man­aging to actu­ally look (and feel)  like a Pigalle-set-remake of Walter Hill’s 1984 Streets of Fire. The Ferroni Brigade turn up their noses at the lur­id, but it’s not just the cast­ing of Klaus Kinski in L’important that sug­gests Zulawski was con­vers­ant with sleaze cinema; else­where in the film Schneider’s char­ac­ter is referred to as hav­ing appeared in a soft­core film called Nymphocula, which might well be one of the mil­lions of altern­ate titles one of Jess Franco’s mil­lions of Eurosex cheapies cir­cu­lated under. 

If you think I’m bring­ing all this up to “call out” Zulawski on sev­er­al charges of Problematic, think again. As a pre­dom­in­antly het­ero­sexu­al male of a cer­tain age I can­’t hon­estly get into a snit over male gaze. But let’s call a spade a spade here. What the Ferroni Brigade call “ecstat­ic naked­ness” extend­ing to Zulawski’s “female prot­ag­on­ists” is argu­ably that, but it’s mainly some­thing else. And again: I am not com­plain­ing. What Zulawski brings to his views of all his lead act­resses inspires a kind of LOOK AT HER awe that is…well, it’s awe, is what it is. What I am saying—finally!— is that cinema deals in images and sounds pri­or to deal­ing in ideo­logy, even if the images and sounds are argu­ably ideo­lo­gic­ally determ­ined. What I’m say­ing is that the erot­ic chaos that Zulawski so con­vin­cingly sim­u­lates in his pic­tures is priv­ileged over cul­ture or “cul­ture.” Or maybe that his whole con­cep­tion of cul­ture is neces­sar­ily filtered through erot­ic chaos. As in L’amour braque, which depicts a pro­duc­tion of The Seagull which may as well have been Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.

Sophie Marceau vamp­ing, with help­less idi­ot Francis Huster

So maybe The Ferroni Brigade and the Birth. Movies. Death. bros have a little more in com­mon than they believe.  There are only so many ways I can put this, though, so here’s Muddy Waters: