Tag Archives: Nastassja Kinski

Cat People (1982, Paul Schrader)

Cat People is so brilliantly made, often so well-acted, it's surprisingly those elements can't make up for its narrative issues. Screenwriter Alan Ormsby has a big problem–he's got to turn his protagonist from a victim to a villain to a victim. Sadly, he and director Schrader choose to employ the lamest technique possible towards the end of the second act… a revelatory, expository (if nicely stylized) dream sequence. With the Giorgio Moroder score, it seems like a really cool looking music video.

Shame it derails the narrative and People never fully recovers. Some of the final scenes' dialogue is really lame.

But there's so much good, starting with Schrader. He has a few directorial approaches he uses repeatedly throughout the film. First is the way he shoots eyes–his actors appear to stare into the camera (or just to the right of it). It makes the viewer feel like a voyeur. Schrader repeats that theme throughout the film. He's showing these personal moments, which requires excellent acting from his cast. Even Malcolm McDowell, who's playing an extraordinary creep, gets these little moments.

In the lead, Nastassja Kinski is mostly excellent. Once the film loses its rhythm, she's in trouble, but she still remains sympathetic. John Heard's good as her paramour. Annette O'Toole's excellent as the other woman. Ruby Dee and Ed Begley Jr. are great in small parts.

Cat People succeeds because of Schrader's attention to detail. Despite the story problems, a lot of the film is flawless.



Directed by Paul Schrader; screenplay by Alan Ormsby, based on a story by DeWitt Bodeen; director of photography, John Bailey; edited by Jacqueline Cambas, Jere Huggins and Ned Humphreys; music by Giorgio Moroder; produced by Charles W. Fries; released by Universal Pictures.

Starring Nastassja Kinski (Irena Gallier), Malcolm McDowell (Paul Gallier), John Heard (Oliver Yates), Annette O’Toole (Alice Perrin), Ruby Dee (Female), Ed Begley Jr. (Joe Creigh) and Scott Paulin (Bill Searle).



One Night Stand (1997, Mike Figgis)

One Night Stand is such an emotionally exhausting film, one of the few moments of relief comes when Wesley Snipes, Ming-Na (as his wife), Nastassja Kinski (she and Snipes had a one night affair) and Kyle MacLachlan (as Kinski’s husband) go out to dinner together. It’s awkward in a far more comfortable way than the rest of the film, which takes its time getting there, but eventually reveals itself to be about the unraveling of Snipes.

Now, Wesley Snipes is often laughably terrible, which makes his performance here a shock. It’s one of the finer male lead performances. Figgis’s film feels like a novel, as it deals with Snipes’s heterosexuality, his marriage, his self-loathing over his homophobia and his career. Everything centers around Robert Downey Jr. as his best friend (the film opens with Snipes introducing the story, talking to the camera). Downey’s a gay guy dying of AIDS and it all sort of swirls around the life Snipes left in New York to sell out and go to LA. Of course, those events happened before the present action… which is not to discount the importance of the dalliance with Kinski and so on….

It’s all connected, but Downey and Snipes’s partnership is the focal point.

Downey’s great, though he sort of has the easiest role, something he mentions in dialogue. Ming-Na’s good, MacLachlan’s fantastic. Great small turn from Thomas Haden Church.

Figgis (who also scores) does an amazing job directing. It’s an astounding piece of work.



Written and directed by Mike Figgis; director of photography, Declan Quinn; edited by John Smith; music by Figgis; Waldemar Kalinowski; produced by Figgis, Ben Myron and Annie Stewart; released by New Line Cinema.

Starring Wesley Snipes (Max), Nastassja Kinski (Karen), Kyle MacLachlan (Vernon), Ming-Na (Mimi), Robert Downey Jr. (Charlie), Glenn Plummer (George), Amanda Donohoe (Margaux), Zoë Nathenson (Mickey) and Thomas Haden Church (Don).


Unfaithfully Yours (1984, Howard Zieff)

If I’d had to guess, I’d say remaking Preston Sturges and having it work to any degree was impossible. Unfaithfully Yours proves me wrong. Instead of doing a–no pun intended–faithful remake, this version is more geared as a Dudley Moore comedy. It’s not a stretch for Moore (though he does, eventually, get to do some great physical comedy) but he’s good, even if it is the kind of role he can sleep through. The script plots out these fantastic set pieces–the last act is spectacular, even if the denouement is a disaster–but there’s great ones throughout. There’s a dueling violins scene between Moore and Armand Assante, which is probably director Howard Zieff’s high point.

Zieff’s an indistinct director, so the script is what makes Unfaithfully Yours work. The scenes between Moore and Albert Brooks–Brooks’s character in general–are great. They made me wonder why Unfaithfully Yours is either dismissed or unknown. Moore’s character being slight never really affects the film’s quality, because of the comedic payoff in the last act, but Nastassja Kinski ruins it. She’s trying to mask her native accent as an Italian one and it doesn’t work. It’s an unpleasant mix of confusing and confounding. She gives the film’s only weak performance, but since her character–married to the older Moore–has to be believable and she never manages, it’s a damning problem.

Assante’s rather good (I never thought I’d believe him as a classical violinist) and Richard Libertini’s got some hilarious moments (Libertini has no problem trading in his Massachusetts accent for an Italian one) and the whole production has a good tone. Bill Conti’s score is playful, the New York locations look great. The scenes with Albert Brooks do look, strangely, like they’re from a different movie in terms of lighting and editing, but they help carry Unfaithfully Yours to its conclusion. The first three-quarters of the film is amusing (it survives an opening 1980s voiceover) but it’s never particularly good. The script’s got strong dialogue exchanges, a few good set pieces, but it never gives away the eventual payoff.

And for someone expecting a more direct lift of the Sturges (like me), it’s a big surprise and a nice one.

It’s just a shame it all falls apart in the last scene. Unfaithfully Yours transitions, in the last few moments, from being a comedy to being a romantic comedy (pejorative intended). It makes it less successful, but it’s still a fine movie.



Directed by Howard Zieff; screenplay by Valerie Curtin, Barry Levinson and Robert Klane, based on a screenplay by Preston Sturges; director of photography, David M. Walsh; edited by Sheldon Karr; music by Bill Conti; production designer, Albert Brenner; produced by Joe Wizan and Marvin Worth; released by 20th Century Fox.

Starring Dudley Moore (Claude Eastman), Nastassja Kinski (Daniella Eastman), Armand Assante (Maxmillian Stein), Albert Brooks (Norman Robbins), Cassie Yates (Carla Robbins) and Richard Libertini (Giuseppe).


Tess (1979, Roman Polanski)

I don’t mind sitting three hours for an unhappy ending. Actually, I think most long films have unhappy endings, don’t they? However, I did not sit through the three poorly acted and written hours of Tess expecting to have to tolerate a scene with the sun rising at Stonehenge and some bullshit insight into the finiteness of nobility. Oh, good grief, the Stonehenge finale was in the book… (I’m cruising Wikipedia as I type).


I was going to start out this post with a discussion on the long, mediocre film. Whether or not the film truly improves over time, or if through the long viewing time, the brain’s quality receptors somehow get burned out. Whether or not the taste buds go dry. Unfortunately, Tess‘s absurd third act–when the unlikable, emotionally abusive husband the audience has just spent forty-five minutes despising, becomes the hero; the somewhat amusing and somehow honorable scoundrel becomes the villain, of course, at the same time–ruins my previous analysis. The analysis only works if the film is consistently mediocre. Tess putrefies at the end. (A reasonable comparison would be Wim Wender’s Until the End of the World, which is two hours longer than Tess–five hours–and never swings high or low, just stays steadily unremarkable).

However, Tess is not a wholly unpleasant experience. The cinematography is beautiful (though one can’t help but notice it’s lifted from Barry Lyndon, which did it better too) and the scenery, for much of the film, is glorious. Polanksi couldn’t shoot in England, so he used the French countryside. While the English countryside is beautiful in its own way, there’s an inherent dreariness to it. The French countryside is simply glorious and when the story becomes dreary, the muddy skies look fake.

Nastassja Kinski is nice enough to turn in an unspeakably bad performance, so bad it’s comical, especially since the subtitle writers of the DVD I watched couldn’t understand her awful English accent and frequently got lines quite wrong. Also terrible is Peter Firth as the husband, but Leigh Lawson is good as the scoundrel. The switch in characters’ personalities is actually not as annoying–oh, it’s still bad–as when we’re expected to remember people who were in the film for four minutes and never in a close-up. There’s period where Kinski visits a friend who I thought was the mother until five or six minutes into the second scene. The film’s writing is terrible, but if the Stonehenge finale isn’t Polanki’s fault I’m not going to go blaming him for all the other tripe in the script.

What a lousy way to spend three hours… though, as Tess was nominated for Best Picture, it’s nice to know the Academy was almost as full of shit in the late 1970s as it is today.



Directed by Roman Polanski; written by Polanski, Gérard Brach, and John Brownjohn, based on a novel by Thomas Hardy; cinematographers, Geoffrey Unsworth and Ghislain Cloquet; edited by Alastair McIntyre and Tom Priestley; music by Philippe Sarde; production designer, Pierre Guffroy; produced by Claude Berri; released by Columbia Pictures.

Starring John Collin (John Durbeyfield), Leigh Lawson (Alec Durbeyfield), Tony Church (Parson Tringham), Nastassja Kinski (Tess) and Peter Firth (Angel Clare).