There are movies we find undoubtedly bad — movies that get us worked up, that offend us, that ruin our day — but that at least offer us the pleasure, afterwards, once the screening is finally over, of having to come up with a good reason for our distaste. Here, unfortunately, that’s not the case. Alexandre O. Philippe’s Kim Novak’s Vertigo is bad on such an immediate, superficial level, that we feel pointing to the screen — where unfolds an uninterrupted spectacle of poor taste — would be more than enough proof of it.
For starters, the soundtrack is a debacle, and of the movie’s 76 minutes, there are maybe five in which we don’t hear it. The extreme shallow focus present in the vast majority of shots — even the wide shots of Kim Novak’s old house! — are likewise ill-conceived in a way we can’t find any reasonable explanation for. The fact that Philippe, seemingly unaware that the movie he is making rises to the level of History Channel quality at best, should try his hand at these misguided “experimental” sequences that offer only the most obvious images demonstrates considerably poor judgment, and unforgivable with regard to the film’s quality.
And still, odd as this may sound, this writer didn’t come out of the theater with the feeling an hour and a half of life had just been wasted. Why? The reader may have already guessed it: because of Kim Novak. Not that she has any great reflections to offer, but even though what is asked of her is mostly banal, even though everything she says is drowned in cheap, sentimental music, even though the many excerpts from her filmography are employed in the most obvious, literal manner — when she talks about looking at herself in the mirror, for instance, we are shown a black-and-white clip of her looking in the mirror — there are a handful of minutes in which she gives a great performance that no amount of bad filmmaking would be able to ruin.
Most of said success comes in the film’s the last third, when, having gone through her beginnings, her success, her retirement, we finally get to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Novak is asked to get the Edith Head-designed grey suit she wore in it. The box, lying in her attic, is sealed with white tape; and inside this box there is another one, and inside this one, yet another. We’re finally one lid away from the suit, but Novak is afraid to open it, so she closes her eyes: she lifts it up, opens them again, and only sees a heap of white wrapping paper. So she is forced to thrust her hands inside in order to retrieve it. And once she does, as would be expected, she is immediately overcome with emotion and begins to cry. “I don’t want to get tears all over it!” she exclaims.
That’s when, in a sudden gesture of almost aristocratic defiance whose significance certainly does not escape her, Novak brings it up to her crying face and cleans, one by one, both of her eyes with the fabric. She then moves it to her slightly runny nose and inhales deeply: she wanted to see, she explains, if she could still smell herself. For a moment, this duchess has looked at the ancient relic with the naïve reverence of an oaf in a museum. Then she remembers who she was — is — and with a simple gesture, displays her nobility.
The fabric has become soft with age, the suit has lost its shape, the color has faded; when they put it on a mannequin, we find it to be rumpled, dull, and flat like a cardboard. It may have remained untouched inside a box for years and years, but time still ravaged it. The fact is, you can hide inside your mansion all you want, but there’s no escaping time: we look at her body and find this same combination of fleshiness met with random rigidity. We look at her right hand, and we notice one stiff finger that immediately reminds us of this shot from Vertigo we had seen some minutes before, in which, her arms wrapped around Jimmy Stewart, we could see that same finger bent in the position it is now locked in.
But moments like these, sparse like flowers on the asphalt road, aren’t enough to justify an entire movie. Quite the opposite: this kind of parasitic filmmaking, which needs to attach itself to a bigger, more interesting organism in order to survive, can’t help but weaken whatever it touches. And if the cattle is still able to take a step afterwards, it’s certainly not due to the tick sucking its blood, but in spite of it. Besides, perched up on top of its prey, how could the tick not have a terribly partial vision of it? Maybe that’s what the ever-present extreme shallow focus is for: it serves as a faithful representation of the director’s process.
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