Alan J Pakula (1971)

Written by Andy and Dave Lewis, Klute is a very well-balanced combination of crime thriller and character study.  The main characters are a young woman called Bree Daniel and New York City, where Bree makes a living as a prostitute.  The place may have been explored with greater sophistication in films later in the 1970s but it’s remarkable nevertheless how fluid and alive it is in the hands of Alan Pakula, the editor Carl Lerner and the DoP Gordon Willis.  Klute is one of the first entries in Willis’s filmography and the camera operator was Michael Chapman.  In the space of the next ten years, these two men had, between them, visualised New York in pictures such as The Godfather, The Godfather part II, Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, Manhattan and Raging Bull.   Jane Fonda’s Bree is hard to beat:    Fonda has certainly never matched this performance, which is one of the best that I’ve seen by any actress.   (I first saw Klute at the Odeon in York, I think in late 1972.  This month’s viewing at BFI must have been my third or fourth.)

Tom Gruneman, a research scientist in Pennsylvania, has disappeared.  The police discover in his office an obscene letter, addressed to Bree Daniel, and that Bree has received several similar letters, apparently from Gruneman.  Six months on, there’s been no further progress in solving his disappearance and Peter Cable (Charles Cioffi), an executive at the company that employed Gruneman, hires John Klute (Donald Sutherland), a family friend, a former cop and now a private detective, to investigate.  We find out who the villain of the piece is at an early stage, and this is just as well since Pakula makes little attempt to conceal his identity even before the unmasking.   That reflects the director’s greater interest in the people in the story than in the machinery of mystery and suspense but Klute remains absorbing as a thriller, even if it’s not a particularly original one.

Bree Daniel wants to stop being a prostitute.  In the first part of Klute, we see her not only at work as a call girl but also auditioning unsuccessfully for modelling and acting jobs.  This is an economical way of suggesting both that New York is full of girls like Bree and the porosity of boundaries between regions of glamour, cultural endeavour and paid-for sex.   It also means that when, later in the story, Klute’s investigation takes him and Bree into the city’s underbelly, the sequences there involving pimps and junkies don’t come across as merely a voyeuristic lower-depths tour – they resonate with the ‘aspirational’ settings in which we saw Bree earlier on.  The narrative is interspersed with Bree’s regular sessions with a psychotherapist (Vivian Nathan), an excellent idea on the screenwriters’ part.  The sessions are a handy means, of course, of having Bree speak her mind to the viewer.  (What she says about the welcome sense of control she feels turning tricks is interesting; this too stays with you as the film progresses and Bree’s indecision about turning her back on work as a call girl becomes a central element.)  These interviews aren’t merely a device, however.  It’s entirely believable that Bree is in analysis – not only because she’s emotionally confused and needs to talk but also because this is another New York activity that (Bree would feel) confers a touch of class.  (It’s a good unstressed joke that the call-girl and the therapist both charge fixed rates for their services.  In an early scene, Bree quotes her charges to a client; later on, she tells the therapist she doesn’t think she can afford to continue in analysis.)

Another imaginative touch by Andy and Dave Lewis is Bree’s visit to the business premises of an elderly tailor, Mr Goldfarb (Morris Strassberg).  He sits quietly, listening and watching as she tells a fantasy story about hobnobbing with aristocracy on a visit to the South of France, and performs a dignified striptease.  Jane Fonda’s characterisation is complete and wonderfully detailed and she puts no distance between herself and the woman she’s playing.   We soon see that Bree is thoroughly professional and something that her clients probably don’t notice – that her professionalism is strained, ambivalent.  At home in her apartment and alone (except for a cat, who puts in an appearance occasionally), she’s uneasy – even before the phone rings to announce another call from a silent menace.  Fonda captures Bree’s brittleness powerfully, especially in her early, tetchy exchanges with the quiet, non-metropolitan Klute:

‘Bree:  Tell me, Klute.  Did we get you a little?  Huh?  Just a little bit?  Us city folk?  The sin, the glitter, the wickedness?  Huh?

Klute:  Oh, that’s so pathetic …

Bree:  [after a short, shocked pause] Fuck off!’

As the relationship between her and Klute develops, into sex and wary friendship, there’s a scene in which they’re together in a fruit market.  He is choosing the fruit, she tags along.  Jane Fonda describes, wordlessly and brilliantly, Bree’s incredulity at what she’s feeling – a physical attraction and a sense of companionship with a man.  At the end of the film, Klute is helping Bree move out of her apartment.  The camera is on the empty bedsit.  The last words on the soundtrack are being spoken by Bree to her therapist:

‘I have no idea what’s going to happen.  I … I just can’t stay in this city, you know?  Maybe I’ll come back.  You’ll probably see me next week.’

The film’s sensibility is too modern, and Jane Fonda’s Bree is too complex, for a simple happy ending but this ambiguous sign-off is perfectly judged.  It satisfies you because Pakula hasn’t copped out.  It’s also enough to allow you to hope for a happy ending.

As the man who solves the mystery of Tom Gruneman and kind of solves Bree’s life, Donald Sutherland has, like Fonda, never been better than he is here.  John Klute may be the title character but this is not a showy role and Sutherland gives a fine-tuned, unselfish performance.  Roy Scheider is good as Bree’s pimp and Dorothy Tristan touching as a prostitute wrecked by drug addiction.  Jean Stapleton has a vivid cameo as Mr Goldfarb’s secretary.  I’ve never understood how Bree is able to remain at the tailor’s premises when everyone’s gone home and the place has been locked up, in order that she can meet the bogeyman alone and in darkness there – although Jane Fonda is so good that she makes you forget the contrivance while the scene is going on.  The repeated playing of a tape-recording is much more spookily effective than the eerie chanting voices and supposedly creepy piano trills in Michael Small’s score.  (There are moments – when a telephone rings, for example – that would have greater impact without the music.)  Small’s love theme for Bree and Klute is nice, though.

6 July 2015