Today I watched this film called
Qui Etes-Vous Polly Maggou as mentioned in the googie thread in fact. It's billed as a satire on the fashion industry which I guess it kinda is but if it was supposed to be funny then I didn't laugh once - and yet I enjoyed it all the same. At times it's incredibly stylish and lush to look at - cos I guess they got loads of fashion people in to make it. Which I suppose is an irony of the film - that it wouldn't be worth watching if it didn't look so good and so the photographers, designers and models prove their value - that they are necessary even - in the making of the very film that questions that. But whatever, I enjoyed it, a post-modern film which is (in part) about a
This is Your Life type programme which gives the film its title. The discussions between the producers and directors of that programme about what fashion means and what tv means and how the latter should portray the former - and then the director taking those arguments to the star, with increasing anger when she refuses to sleep with him. And then there is another plot somehow intertwined with that about the prince of some made-up country trying first to find Polly and then marry her.
The end effect is a kind of debate about fashion and so on spliced together with a surreal fairy tale of the kind that might be directed by Bunuel, and that makes for an enjoyable and uncategorisable film which has the added bonus of being stunningly stylish in parts; particularly the famous bit with the black bobbed girls in front of black and white stripes, and the fashion show at the start inside what looks like a giant termites' mound, which introduces the Anna Wintour type character who gets some of the films best lines and appears every now and again to give a bit of an explanation of what is happening, or what she thinks should happen. Oh and the funeral fashion show is pretty good too. In fact, speaking of surrealism, the designer whose metal clothes are literally at the cutting edge of fashion (they cut one of the model's arms, get it!) is called Isidore Ducasse, which was the real name of the Comte de Leautremonte who wrote
Maldoror the famous proto-surrealist text. I read a number of reviews of the film, all of which said basically the same things, seemingly regurgitated from the same source and not one of them picked up on that.
William Klein the director made a film called
Mr Freedom which as I remember is a similarly unfunny yet interesting "satire" of superhero comics with Serge Gainsbourg. And the girl who played Polly Maggou was apparently a real model really from Brooklyn called Dorothy Magraw, who after this film suddenly stopped acting and modelling and was never heard of again.