SATURDAY RUBRICS: 11/16/24
WHO YOU CALLING A WHORE?
STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS: Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels in Klute
Pauline Kael from The New Yorker’s July 3, 1971, issue:
“Jane Fonda’s motor runs a little fast. As an actress, she has a special kind of smartness that takes the form of speed; she’s always a little ahead of everybody, and this quicker beat – this quicker responsiveness – makes her more exciting to watch. This quality works to great advantage in her full-scale, definitive portrait of a call girl in Klute. It’s a good, big role for her, and she disappears into Bree, the call girl, so totally that her performance is very pure - unadorned by ‘acting.’ As with her defiantly self-destructive Gloria in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, she never stands outside Bree, she gives herself over to the role and yet she isn’t lost in it - she’s fully in control, and her means are extraordinarily economical. She has somehow got to a plane of acting at which even the closest closeup never reveals a false thought and, seen on the movie streets a block away, she’s Bree, not Jane Fonda, walking toward us.
“The center of the movie is the study of the temperament of the drives of this intelligent, tough high-bracket call girl who wants to quit; she tries to get modelling jobs, she wants to be an actress, she is in analysis, yet she enjoys her power over her customers. It is the life surrounding her profession that frightens her; the work itself has peculiar compensations. Though there have been countless movie prostitutes, this is perhaps the first major attempt to transform modern clinical understanding into human understanding and dramatic meaning. The conception may owe some debt to the Anna Karina whore in My Life to Live, but Bree is a much more ambivalent character. She’s maternal and provocative with her customers, confident and contemptuously cool; she’s a different girl alone - huddled in bed in her disorderly room. The suspense plot involves the ways in which prostitutes attract the forces that destroy them. Bree’s knowledge that as a prostitute she has nowhere to go but down and her mixed-up efforts to escape make her one of the strongest feminine characters to reach the screen. It’s hard to remember that this is the same actress who was the wide-eyed, bare-bottomed Barbarella and the anxious blond bride of Period of Adjustment and the brittle, skittish girl in the broad-brimmed hat of The Chapman Report; I wish Jane Fonda could divide herself in two, so we could have new movies with that naughty-innocent comedienne as well as with this brilliant no-nonsense dramatic actress. Her Gloria invited comparison with Bette Davis in her great days, but the character of Gloria lacked softer tones, shading, variety. Her Bree transcends the comparison; there isn’t another young dramatic actress in American films who can touch her.
…
“Klute is a powerful, scary melodrama, and only once does the discreet director intrude on Miss Fonda’s performance. In a scene between Bree and a customer, there is a cut to her looking at her wristwatch while feigning passion. A businesslike look at the watch before her ecstatic cries or even after, might possibly be consistent with the character - Jane Fonda is just naturally in a hurry - but this is a crummy, cute nod to the audience for a laugh. The bit sticks out, because Miss Fonda has moved beyond working the audience.” -
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Fonda, who will be 87 next month, was then at the height of her anti-war activism and went on to win in spite of it the Oscar for this performance. The category that year included Vanessa Redgrave, Janet Suzman, Glenda Jackson, and Julie Christie. Jane famously and pointedly thanked those who applauded her and then took the advice of her father and said simply, “There’s a great deal to say but I’m not going to say it tonight. Thank you very much.”
Jane’s performance and her “look” as Bree became so iconic that a fashion shoot which featured the photo below of model Freja Beha Erichsen by photographer Terry Richardson for Vogue Nipon in 2010 paid such stunning and specific tribute to Jane as Bree that it has several times shown up on my social media feeds as posts from friends labeling it as Jane. It’s not. The hair is the giveaway.
I also loved this 2021 essay “Less a Bimbo Than a Butch” by Philippa Snow about Jane in Klute which was published in The Independent.
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