āKlute is a film about the kindness of a very few men, and the evil of many more of them. It is also about a very beautiful, very smart, and very self-sufficient young woman, played by Fonda, who happens to sell her body for money. In several scenes, she is pictured wearing a dress by Norman Norell which makes her resemble a mermaid, or, if one prefers, a Joan of Arc figure in chain-mail armour. On the poster, she wears it unzipped at the back like Vicki Dougan ā the patron saint of quaint erogenous zones ā as if she is expressing all three of her selves in one outfit: mythic, tough, and slyly sexy. Women want to be her, men want to love her, and all of us want to understand her better, but Bree is no Golightly, and does not go lightly ā few would be brave enough to call her Miss Whoever-you-are, and sweet little Mean Reds Hepburn would never equate the cost of a fuck to the cost of a washing machine. It is also a film about the ways in which we coerce other people in order to make them hurt us, for the pleasure of saying āI told you soā. There is love in it but, as is sometimes the case in nonfictional life, it's a sad love. That Jane Fonda's wounded-hellcat way of playing Bree is the gravitational pull at the movieās centre is obvious, less apparent is how much of the character is invention, and how much is Fonda herself. In 1971 ā after Vietnam, and after Barbarella ā time spent fending off detractors, making dangerous if well-intentioned decisions and trading on a sexualised image were, after all, hardly unknown possibilities. "When I was researching myself,ā she said in an interview with Harpers after releasing her memoir, āI wondered, is there a 'there' there? Or am I just a hollow person who gets filled up by whatever man I'm with?ā This was a perfect Bree Daniels line. One minor difference between the two women: in Klute, Bree doesn't want the phone to ring.ā
I wrote about Klute for The Quietus.
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