Movies – The Delphine Seyrig Project – The William Klein Films

Delphine Seyrig in “Mr. Freedom.” credit: kebekmac.blogspot.com

It’s pure speculation on my part, but I suspect Delphine Seyrig became aware of William Klein’s oeuvre through her painter / husband at the time, Jack Youngerman. Before his subsequent film work, and before becoming the renowned street photographer of Paris Vogue, the New York City-born Klein was stationed in France with the U.S. Army. He stayed on after his service in Paris, studying painting with Fernand Leger and, I suspect, making the acquaintance of Youngerman and his good friend Ellsworth Kelly. I’d further speculate that, once Klein expanded his palette to filmmaking, Klein and Delphine were each anxious to work with the other. Delphine has only a quick cameo in Klein’s funny and lovely first feature film, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966) (Delphine made two films for French television, Turgenev’s A Month In The Country and the Samuel Beckett written-and-directed Comédie in 1966, as well as her usual stage work), but features prominently in Klein’s superb second feature, Mr. Freedom (1968).

Dorothy MacGowan in “Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?” credit: criterion.com

Klein’s first feature film, after an impressive series of short documentaries, was Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (Qui Êtes-Vous, Polly Maggoo?) (France, 1966), a rigorously satirical love/hate examination of the 60’s Paris fashion industry, one particularly appealing and disarming working model within it (Polly, portrayed with astonishingly good humor and candor by Dorothy MacGowan), and the inevitable blending of creativity, expression, narcissism, earnest work and commercial opportunism.

The film opens on the preparations, and presentation, of a new line of women’s clothing made entirely from sheets of aluminum. Strikingly sculptural but wildly impractical, the small, select audience of onlookers (including highly influential fashion magazine editors) is nonetheless enraptured with the “garments.” One of the metal suits cuts the arm of a model, but the designer dabs a little powder on the wound and away she goes. There’s as much attention paid to how the models navigate the suits as there is on their effect on the audience. Throughout the movie, the models are just normal, hard-working regulars who understand that designers and photographers are using them to create something far larger, more universal, and, most importantly, more lucrative. They are also, of course, employed to serve some really bad ideas – sheet-metal gowns, for instance.

“Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?” credit: littleotsu.com

In the always shifting pantheon of “celebrity” models, Polly is near the top, and walking down the street between working gigs is a constant gauntlet of admirers and hustlers. Good-natured but determined, Polly makes it home only to discover that her landlady has let a TV crew into her small apartment. They’re from the popular show “Qui Êtes-Vous…?” (“Who Are You…”), where TV interviewers amiably ambush famous people on camera and inquire about who they were before they got to be so darned famous. The producers have selected a heavy-thinker type, Jean-Jacques Georges (a young Philippe Noiret) for Polly in their efforts to “find the truth behind the make-up!” But she relates best to the production manager, Grégoire (Jean Rochefort), who is considering taking over the interviewing himself in addition to coordinating the shoot.

Dorothy MacGowan in “Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?” credit: criterioncast.com

Unbeknownst to her, Polly is also being pursued by Igor, an unreconstructedly adolescent French prince (the regally handsome Sami Frey), whose minister has sent out two minions to collect intelligence on her and invite her back to his kingdom. Her modeling jobs continue – she perches high above Paris streets on a rooftop sculpture during one, then, days later, emerges from a coffin in horror-film make-up and a black cloak to be borne away in a horse-drawn hearse. “We’re asking ‘Is Paris Dead?’ – fashion-wise, get it?” explains the fashion journaliste producing the shoot – our own Delphine, in a 25-second cameo.

Dorothy MacGowan in “Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?” credit: citizenpoulpe.com

Much of the film seems patterned after Richard Lester’s intriguing patchwork-quilt films of the earlier sixties, most notably A Hard Day’s Night and Help! – seeming documentaries enlivened with humorous fictional elements. But Klein starts smearing the fictional elements as the film progresses – the more Grégoire works with Polly, the less actual shooting occurs. Grégoire’s film crew, in a few later scenes, morph into the filmmaker’s unruly family at dinner, with Polly as the guest of honor. And we never really know if Polly actually meets the Prince, or whether all of those scenes are his own internal fantasies. Polly is the center of the film, but Klein’s point is how Polly becomes the reflection of what everyone else needs their own lives to be, and how the exploitation of those needs (and our own participation thereof) by the larger media culture inevitably commodifies and cheapens them. It IS the sixties, after all.

Klein turns to color, clutter and pessimism for his second film, which serves an entirely different side of the media / cultural coin. Chicago film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum declared it to be “conceivably the most anti-American movie ever made,” and, even if its darkly comic aspects don’t sustain the entire film, it’s successful shots land particularly hard in our American present day.

John Abbey in “Mr. Freedom.” credit: moviecitynews.com

Mr. Freedom (France, 1968) starts out with the sound of sirens – a local sheriff returning to his office after some pretty harsh riot-police activity rousting dark-skinned poor people in an unnamed urban setting. He feels off-shift, but he opens a secret closet in another room to reveal that he’s about to start another shift – as the costumed super-hero Mr. Freedom! Wielding twin pistols, Mr. Freedom (John Abbey) bursts through an upper-apartment window into the kitchen of a family of evil looting blacks. He purports to lead them through a sung chorus of his theme song (“F-R-double-E D, D-O-M spells Freedom!”) to strike fear in their hearts, then indiscriminately shoots three of them before leaping back out the window. That’ll teach ‘em!

Later, he reports to Central Freedom, Freedom headquarters in the Freedom Building – where else? – to receive a special assignment from his superior, Dr. Freedom (Donald Pleasence), who only presents himself of a TV monitor. Evil commies who hate freedom have infiltrated Switzerland, taken out the French super-hero agent Capitaine Formidable, and are now setting their sights on France. It’s up to Mr. Freedom to go to France and root out the enemies, most notably the Russian Moujik Man (Philippe Noiret) and Chinese Maoist Red China Man (who turns out to be a fifty-foot long inflatable plastic dragon.)

John Abbey in “Mr. Freedom.” credit: quadcinema.com

Upon landing in Paris, Mr. Freedom bumps into and knocks over various pedestrians, karate-chops an Asian tourist photographing his young family (and steals his camera), and commandeers a Citroen taxicab, practically crashing into his hotel. Mr. Freedom’s main contact in France is Marie-Madeleine (Delphine), Capitaine Formidable’s loyal partner (costumed, of course, and fetchingly) who ambushes Mr. Freedom Kato-style in an elevator, explains to him the details of Capitaine Formidable’s demise, and starts to question him on ‘what-the-hell-are-you-people-getting-done-in-Vietnam-anyway.’ This, of course leads to one of an impressive number of “let-me-tell-YOU-somethin’-punk” diatribes on American prerogative and infallibility. Seemingly convinced, Marie-Madeleine introduces Mr. Freedom to the French cohort of Freedom, Inc., led by guys named Dick Sensass (Jean-Claude Drouot) Teddy Dripdry, Johnny Cadillac, Roger Dropout, Jacques Detergent, and, of course, Serge Gainsbourg as Mr. Drugstore. The meeting turns into a burlesque pep-rally and frat party, egged on by the bellowing Mr. Freedom.

John Abbey and Delphine Seyrig in “Mr. Freedom.” credit: hyperallergic.com

The American embassy is a grocery shopping-mall with go-go girls, and the ineffectual head of French intelligence is another giant puppet superhero, Super French Man. Mr. Freedom finally tracks down his enemies in a Paris Metro station, only to be captured, later escaping with the help of Moujik Man’s female partner, Marie-Rouge (Catherine Rouvel), whom he then kills. He escapes back to Marie-Madeleine’s flat, and discovers her son is terrified of him. Demoralized, Marie-Madeleine comforts him, feeds him Corn Flakes, and has a Freedom, Inc. dentist fix a faulty transmitter in his tooth. He then kills the dentist. Back to full-strength, he and Marie-Madeleine revisit French Freedom Inc., which has devolved into something between gladiator training and The Road Warrior, and they embark on a series of attacks and counter-attacks throughout the country that seem more violent and pointless with each sortie. Finally, enmeshed in an unwinnable scenario, Mr. Freedom thinks he’s just set off The Big One to teach the “frogs” a lesson, but, as his handler Dr. Freedom explains, things don’t wrap up so neatly.

In the late sixties, the cynical audacity and comic-style visuals of the film probably sustained the 91-minute film. Klein’s satirical ferocity is admirable, but, admittedly, it just seems relentlessly monotonous today. Nonetheless, the most damning aspects of Klein’s film involve the longevity of the simple-minded “we love our freedom, they hate our freedom” tropes, how gullibly we tend to accept them over and over, and nationalist willful ignorance of why exactly they’ve hated us, then and now. Thematically, the film holds up today, almost presciently, but that says far more about us today than even William Klein might have suspected.

Delphine Seyrig in “Mr. Freedom.” credit: moviecitynews.com

Delphine, as usual, works incredibly hard to make her role seem effortless – nothing we’ve seen from those first three feature films of hers would have prepared you for her Marie-Madeleine. Her affection for the late Capitaine Formidable, and her fervor as Mr. Freedom’s MC during those Freedom Inc. rallies, is bedrock credible even within the absurdity of the context. Her scene with Mr. Freedom recuperating from his run-in with his arch enemies, force-feeding him Corn Flakes in an orange-sherbet silk slip, is simultaneously endearing and, knowing him as we do, concerning. A superspy-femme-fatale-assassin-cheerleader’s work is never done, is it?