Such a frustrating disappointment

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Hardly anything witty about love has dawned on Zulawski's third feature, an almost exclusively chamber drama, where a burgeoning attraction between a pornography photographer Servais Mont (Testi) and a second-rate actress Nadine Chevalier (Schneider), has barely taken off from the platonic struggle, because Nadine is married to Jacques (Dutronc), to whom she bears a tangible fusion of gratitude, responsibility and affection, which complicates their situation into a torrid emotional abyss so as to testify that love is indeed the most inscrutable, unpredictable, yet the most important thing.Crammed in the high-ceiling, antique-looking Parisian apartments and loci like theatre, bar and hospital, its mise-en-scène strains to stay claustrophobic, fluid and quivering, signals the characters' shaky states, but, Zulawski and the screenwriter Christopher Frank fail to let their emotions run the full gamut to reach out its dazzled viewers, a stately but shallowly anaemic Testi cannot portray a role, whose inner depth is apparently out of his league, fumbles and routinely daydreams from scene to scene, his fervent gaze can not justify Servais' actions, his thoughts, and the limp dialogue doesn't help either.Ms. Schneider, won Best Actress in the first-ever César Awards, is palpably more tapped into her role, sending off her raw charisma into her inwardly paralysed psyche, she tries to be frank with her own feelings, desire, dignity and pride at her own peril, but there are too many smoke and mirrors around to indulgently mystify an uncompounded, and fragmented story-line, the only thing to ameliorate the faint exasperation is when the pure dramatic sequences take the stage: Kinski's spit-fire flare-up is a mood-enforcer, Dutronc stands out in his chummy whims and delightfully erratic behavioural conundrum, a peculiar man who withdraws into a reprieve from, in an obvious tenor, a husband's functionality (abruptly falls into slumber so that his wife can only hopelessly play with herself to slake her desire), but also hatches up something seemingly unspeakable and inexplicable with Servais through an undertone of self-abandonment and total capitulation, in a muscle-versus-quirk contest over the same woman.Zulawski's highbrow ambition to extract something refine and sophisticated out of the triangular deadlock doesn't consummately do the trick, in the end, Servais has to pay his debt with his blood and internal bleeding, from a father figure Mazelli (Dauphin), in his case, love IS the most important thing, if he can endure all the pain both physically and mentally, to demonstrate his unconditional devotion.Georges Delerue's score is ever so conspicuous whenever a close-up is zoomed in between Servais and Nadine, to cloyingly illustrate their passion, otherwise, it remains forbidding and sinister, circles around a pessimistic account of love, in its purest but strangely tepid manifestation.

I thought that Pasolini's film "Salò o le 120 Diornate di Sodoma" was the best portrait of depravity I would see but this film exceeds "Salo". It is entitled "The Important Thing is to Love" because love is the sole good thing one can do amidst a world of utter ugliness where the sum of a man is "the ugliest things he can do".Żuławski has created a film replete with sadness, melancholy, grief and misery and it is crafted so well that it is dazzling and, at times, beautiful. He is well assisted by his cast of actors, including his three beautiful leads, and the film's composer Georges Delerue, whose signature tune haunts the film as a discordant plaint.The film depicts the relationship of a married couple to a man who becomes infatuated with the wife. They share the world of acting, film and pornography and each is a 'prostitute' in their own way. The husband, Jacques, is suicidally depressed and finds himself outside of life and not willing to enter life and engage. His wife, Nadine, is a broken personality who feels that Jacques saved her and she desires an acting career whilst making money as a porn star. Servais is a loner with a broken father; he has become involved with a porn/sex wheeler dealer, Mazelli, who is a gangster of sorts. All yearn to break free from the world they inhabit and Servais's plan, paying to have Nadine cast as Lady Anne in an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Richard III", seems a possible means of release. Like Richard III, the film's characters are somewhat deformed yet they are less ugly in their deformities than the superficially glamorous world they inhabit. Of course Servais's plan fails. Words attributed to Rimbaud, which are the final words of Servais's late friend who died from liver failure, capture the tormented pains of the characters:"Turmoil originated your poetry/ Immense forces served you/ Your entrails burst, death menaces/ Chosen City!/ Consume your shrieks In the deaf trumpet."The film's themes seem clearer than the characters and their dense opaqueness. It is a series of brief, fast changing scenes that I found jarring, perhaps the intent to underline discord and distress. It is like one long howl. It is powerful and almost perfect.

I'm not surprised to read here at IMDb that Romy called this her best work. She leads a cast of irresistible losers (Dutronc, Kinski, Testi) in the wholly believable debauchery that is so truly the amoral dilemma of the profession Maugham has called "THE show business". The physical electricity of these performers is such that I came away from it thirty years ago thinking that Miss Schneider was Brando's doppelganger. Or perhaps she WAS Brando! After all, they were never seen together, were they? If acting may be defined as the truthful response to fictional stimuli, then this film, which, by the way, must be screening daily in both Heaven and Hell, was perhaps shot in one cosmic take. These actors display - seamlessly - their bodies, their appetites, their loves, egos, ids and superegos. Never mind the sadness, life is for learning.

This one is a strong contender!Romy Schneider was highly praised (and granted a Cesar) for her "harrowing" part but Zulawski is definitely a deeply boring terribly pretentious director.Outside Schneider,the casts includes zombie Dutronc who portrays a totally unconvincing character with suicidal tendencies and Fabio Testi,one of the worst Italian actors.The plot is very trite but it is given a "meaningful" "intellectual" treatment whose purpose is to make the audience feel they have watched an "important" work.Nadine Chevalier was Schneider's answer to those who thought she was still their Sissi.I'm not an intellectual:I like Sissi best.