Scott's Movie Comments

Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? (Who Are You, Polly Magoo?)

I became curious about this odd 1966 French film when I first read about it in R.J. Jamison’s biography Grayson Hall: A Hard Act to Follow. I resolved to seek it out last month after coming across a funky/dingy pub named Polly Maggoo in the Latin Quarter during our visit to Paris. Clearly, this strange cult film is an object of fascination for more than a few people, even four decades after it was made. As a disdainful satire of the fashion world (an easy target even, or especially, back then), it is a progenitor of everything from Prêt-à-Porter to Zoolander to The Devil Wears Prada. It also takes on the media and, well, anything else that seems to have been bugging William Klein, the New York-born photographer, who directed this. Depending on your point of view, the incoherent and jumpy narrative structure either reflects a unique vision of reality or else the cast and crew were just making it up as they went along. Some sequences have a compelling quality about them, but they work in isolation rather than part of a whole. Rewards for latter-day viewers include a young Jean Rochefort—who has one of the all-time great cinematic faces and who can currently be seen in my neck of the woods as a straight man waiter in Mr. Bean’s Holiday—as the journalist making the titular Ms. Maggoo the subject of a pretentious weekly reality program. (The following week’s subject is Pope Paul VI.) The late, lamented Philippe Noiret is on hand as a reporter. Sami Frey plays a prince whose destiny may be linked with Polly’s. Or not. And Grayson Hall does a dragon lady turn as a thinly disguised version of Diana Vreeland. In the end, it’s all more interesting as a time capsule than a movie. (Seen 17 May 2007)

The Quiet Man

I swore I would give this a fresh viewing. And I finally have. At this point in my life, this 1952 movie looks completely different from the first time or two that I saw it. For one thing, the scenery is completely familiar since I now live in the neighborhood. But the story and the characters have more resonance for me now. Make no mistake, I am no Sean Thornton. I have no Irish blood in me and moving to Ireland was no sentimental homecoming. Still, it is amazing how well the film captures the dynamics of an American-Irish marriage. This labor of love by Irish-American director John Ford is essentially a cartoon-ish shaggy dog story, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an awful lot of truth in it. Its portrait of small town life in the west, in which the community takes an outsize interest in the arrival of an apparent stranger and the personal affairs of a newly married couple rings all too true. Ford’s view of rural Irish life is largely idyllic, with the village embracing militant republicans as well as a Protestant reverend and his wife, and this view is not inaccurate. Still, some quaint features of the story compare grimly with current times. Ireland is doing some serious soul-searching these days about binge drinking and violence among its young men, and this fact gives the movie’s good-natured portrayal of drinking and fighting a bitter aftertaste. At the end of the day, however, this is still the definitive film about the tenacious hold that Ireland has always had on its American brethren. [Related commentary] (Seen 11 February 2003)