The public woman

Movie
German title	The public woman
Original title	La femme publique
Country of production	France
original language	French
Publishing year	1984
length	113 minutes
Age rating	FSK 16
Rod
Director	Andrzej Żuławski
script	Dominique Garnier
production	René Cleitman
music	Alain Wisniak
camera	Sacha Vierny
cut	Marie-Sophie Dubus
occupation
	Valérie Kaprisky : Ethel; Francis Huster : Lucas Kessling; Lambert Wilson : Milan Mliska; Patrick Bauchau : Ethel's father; Giselle Pascal : Gertrude; Roger Dumas : André;

The public woman (French: La femme publique ) is a French erotic drama from 1984 .

action

The young actress Ethel works as a nude model to finance her impoverished parents and herself. The fanatical director Lucas Kessling is looking for the leading actress for his film adaptation of the novel The Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky . When Ethel shows up for the casting , he is mesmerized by her ecstatic charisma. Lucas hires Ethel and expects this ecstasy every day of shooting. But he soon complains that she is "physically but not emotionally" naked and harassed her mercilessly in order to break her pride and whip her to a top performance as an actor. Ethel loses herself in her role and soon can no longer distinguish between reality and fiction.

Ethel falls in love with Milan, a dishwasher on the film set. He is a Czech emigrant who was forced by the Czech secret service to kill a clergyman in Paris. After murdering an actress who threatens to take away Ethel's role, he commits suicide. Ethel becomes a movie star and Lucas' lover, but when Lucas realizes that it was not him but she who took advantage of him, he kills himself too.

background

The film is based on the autobiographical experiences of the scriptwriter Dominique Garnier , who was once a jobless artist herself and worked as a nude model. Garnier dealt with two aspects of female nudity: as a livelihood and as a means of self-discovery. The Slant Magazine called Andrzej Zulawski work as a "tour de force" and notes that Ethel superficially weak, but was strong in reality. In the course of the film, Ethel is constantly seen as an object of pleasure, only wearing sunglasses as “clothing”. The imagery, however, portrays her as a “goddess” surrounded by “decayed material” and lets her survive as a victor while the men die.

Lead actress Kaprisky explained: “It is the story of a girl who offers the only thing she can dispose of: her naked body. She tries to free herself from inner chains by dancing naked, but the more she breaks free, the tighter the chains become. ”Kaprisky, who described herself critically as a“ terrible actress ”, noticed that she became a sex symbol and exhibitionist after the film was stamped .

Kaprisky said that her director completely forbade Żuławski to look at the text before the first day of shooting, so that she would appear more spontaneous on the set. She described the collaboration as very fruitful, but was completely unprepared for the media hype surrounding the film. She couldn't cope with the sudden fame and suffered "crying fits every day." Before filming her follow-up film Devilish Embrace , the director Christopher Frank told her to first take a cure and only come back when she was mentally ready.

The film drew 1.3 million viewers to cinemas in France.

criticism

“Sacha Vierny [s] pictures deserve more than this soft porn with Weltschmerz and Politekel, with the belated, split-up cinema expressionism from third hand: long shadows, flickering decors, constantly high-revving dialogues. It's sad when a cult film ends up in box-type cinemas near the train station and ends up stranded. "

- Hellmuth Karasek

"Artistic, sophisticated and, according to some critics, overloaded."

- New York Times

"The story is ambitious, but the design clearly falls short of its claim in terms of the opulent appearance of the images (with sex interludes like in a peep show) and the inability to make feelings and passions plausible."

- Lexicon of international film