"The Important Thing Is to Love" delivers iconoclastic content and style

After Polish director Andrzej Źuławski’s 1972 film “The Devil” was banned by government authorities, he emigrated to Paris to pursue creative freedom. There, in 1975, he directed the elusive, eccentric “The Important Thing Is to Love” loosely based on Christopher Frank’s novel “American Night/La Nuit Américaine.” That title refers to shooting “day for night,” also a 1973 Francois Truffaut film.

In interviews director Źuławski explains that the title here came during a post film discussion. When a distributor asked what the film was really about, Źuławski responded, “The Important Thing Is to Love.” That theme dominates a romantic triangle, but in a thoroughly unconventional way, characteristic of the entire film. The through line includes Nadine Chevalier (a fabulous Romy Schneider), her husband Jacques (Jacques Dutronc), and paparazzi, rival love interest Servais Mont (Fabio Testi), soon in debt to a gangster.

Reluctantly, the thirty-year-old Nadine works in the porn industry and, thanks to behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Servais,  will star in a theater group production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” (with lead actor a bizarre Klaus Kinski as Karl-Heinz Zimmer). This makes the narrative sound more straightforward in content and style than it is, for the story digresses to sex orgies, gangster clashes, and cross-dressers played for comedy in a disjointed, self-conscious dependence on idiosyncratic appearance, behavior, and style.

Źuławski intends exactly this, choosing to use an occasional unfettered camera (before the Steadicam), Georges Delerue’s maddeningly magisterial score, uneven pacing, and heavy-handed art direction, especially the color scheme. Źuławski says he chose Servais’ clothes to mimic those against the communist regime in Poland: jeans and an American vest. Meantime, in further sexist features, Źuławski so admired Schneider’s back that he insisted on low-slung, backless dresses.

A newspaper reviewer of the “Richard III” production writes, “It is expressionistic without reason, the directing a mishmash of contradicting intensions and random ideas to the point of which the only point is chaos.” Yes, sounds exactly right to me. In French with English subtitles, “The Important Thing Is to Love” screens at Webster University’s Winifred Moore auditorium Tuesday, May 14, and Saturday, May 18, at 7:30 each of those evenings.  For more information, you may visit the film series website.