Shown out of competition in Venice in conjunction with the festival giving a lifetime achievement award to its 92-years-young titular subject, documentary Kim Novak’s Vertigo is essentially a cinematic fan letter, written with love but chock full of gushing, purple prose, some of it by the subject herself.
Swiss filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe is already known for his essayistic celebrations of auteurs and their masterworks, including Lynch/Oz, Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist and The People Vs. George Lucas. He may take writing, directing and co-producing credits here, and appears onscreen as Novak’s interviewer, but it’s Novak who feels like the one who’s largely in charge.
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That commitment to seeing the world through Novak’s eyes comes with a certain price in credibility. However much you might admire her as an actor, especially for her most famous and justly celebrated performance in Vertigo (1958), it’s hard not to feel a little skeptical of her own and the film’s insistence that, “at the peak of her fame,” she “turned her back on the spotlight to embrace a life of solitude, self-expression and authenticity,” in the words of the film’s press notes. Okay, queen.
There are only the merest, teensiest hints that other factors might have been at play, such as the institutional misogyny that values female stars most when they’re at the peak of their beauty. Certainly, there is not the faintest whiff of a waft of a suggestion that Novak was anything other than delightful to work with, the very incarnation of sweetness and light herself.
In the end, some viewers may find themselves inexplicably turning on the subject even if Philippe, editor David Lawrence and the team build a strong case for the greatness of her talent through judiciously chosen archive clips from some of her best films, in addition to Vertigo. She speaks very persuasively about herself as a “reactor” as much as an actor, a partner capable of bringing just as much emotion to a scene even if she barely spoke. That, of course, is luminously visible in the bits we see from Vertigo opposite James Stewart, especially in scenes where her character Judy is also giving a performance of her own as Madeleine, a woman supposedly possessed by the spirit of her ancestor Carlotta.
But snatches of other Novak performances build the case for her range, especially those from star turns like Bell Book and Candle (1958) and Jeanne Eagels (1957); her two films supporting Frank Sinatra Pal Joey (1957) and The Man With the Golden Arm (1955); and the underrated 60s work such as Of Human Bondage (1964) and The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968). How odd that this treats such interesting late career works like Just a Gigolo (1978), The Mirror Crack’d (1980) and Liebestraum (1991) as if they never existed.
Kim Novak’s Vertigo is just as capriciously selective when it comes to covering Novak’s biography, leaving huge gaps in the story, like her marriages and family life, in favor of much celebration of the houses she’s lived in and the pets she’s owned. I, for one, would have been very happy with a lot more discussion of her adorable pet goat, but perhaps the film errs a bit too much when dwelling at length on Novak’s childhood and parents. Her appreciation of Greta Garbo is more illuminating, although may not fully justify quite how much screen time clips from Queen Christina take up here.
Likewise, the sequence wherein Novak unboxes her grey suit from Vertigo, the one designed by incomparable costume designer Edith Head, might have benefited from a few sly edits, perhaps making way for more discussion about the outfit’s significance in the film and not just its function as a fetish for the star herself. But others may find Novak’s eccentric rhapsodizing utterly charming, and there’s no denying the woman is a force of nature, like her own paintings, swirling with secrets, pastel and lurid all at once.
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