Who Are You, Polly Magoo?

William Klein – 1966 – France

 

Very 60s French satire about a vapid American fashion model in Paris (Dorothy McGowan) and the attempts by a television crew to profile her.  Their dilemma: is there anything of substance below that pretty and polished façade?  The style is almost certainly derived from Richard Lester’s Beatles films and The Knack (1965), with a little of Godard’s Masculin Feminin mixed in for good measure, but the spirit of wackiness seems more forced than charming in this case, partly because of Klein’s contempt for his material that is simmering underneath.  It feels like he may have preferred to make a vehement anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist diatribe but was already locked into this quasi-whimsical pop fairy tale when that dawned on him.  The result is that a little of the film’s kaleidoscopic style goes a long way, and the film would have been just as well off at half the length.  A subplot involving a pair of bumbling foreign spies trailing Polly goes nowhere and isn’t very funny.  They work for an Eastern European prince who spots an image of Polly and vows to make her his wife.  Klein clearly wants to critique the commercial world and pop culture, but his is a futile mission simply because the eye-catching visuals of print ads, TV spots and outrageous, glittering runway fashions have their own power that doesn’t weaken simply because someone informs you that the images are meaningless.  McGowan was a real model with a short-lived career who retired soon after this film, which was her only appearance in a movie.