Klute

Alan J. Pakula – 1971 – USA

Director Alan J. Pakula was the great poet of paranoia in American films in the 1970s.  Along with William Friedkin’s The French Connection (also 1971), Pakula’s Klute effectively announced the arrival of the 70s sensibility like few other American films.  Nothing about it could be a more extreme departure from the general philosophy of the 60s, onscreen and off.  Wiped away for good were the sincere buoyancy of Hollywood scenarios, as well as the garish lighting and photography designed to show stars and locations to their greatest advantage.  In their place, Pakula fills the frame with blackness, allowing faces to emerge in fleeting shards of light.  Instead of the frame catering to the needs of the actors, now it swells out of all proportion, rendering human beings as mere brushstrokes in a massive, indifferent mural.  Concurrent with this reduction of human warmth is the film’s still-bold exposure of the dark and ugly underside of the American dream.  Despite its murder mystery elements, what Klute is really about – (aesthetically as much as thematically) – is the failure of the 60s.  Pakula shows us that by the end of the 60s, highly touted emancipations in areas of sexuality and drugs had already been absorbed into the existing rackets of prostitution and narcotics trafficking.  This idea is seen most blatantly in the fact that the villain of the piece, (Charles Cioffi, in a chilling performance), repeatedly listens to a taped recording of Bree espousing her philosophy of total liberation.  He insists, and Jane Fonda’s character Bree is forced to agree, that everything the human libido can conjure may not be okay, and that “there are dark corners in everyone’s minds that are better off left alone.”  Rarely in a film by someone not usually considered a major auteur are style and subject matter as symbiotically fused as powerfully as they are by Alan Pakula in Klute, which were followed up throughout the next decade in The Parallax View (1974), All the President’s Men (1976) and Rollover (1981).