July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 55I
t could be the premise of one of nelly kaplan’s films:
a young woman arrives in France with little to her name
beyond $50, a letter of introduction to Henri Langlois, great
beauty, and extreme magnetism. She has affairs with titans of
film and literature; begins her own career as an artist; debuts
with an incendiary, widely admired film; and yet remains a
resolute outsider for the next 50 years.
Kaplan was born in Buenos Aires in 1931 to a Russian-Jewish
family. Growing bored of her bourgeois life, she set sail for Le Havre
to represent the Argentine Cinémathèque in France in 1953. Shortly
after arriving in Paris, a 22-year-old Kaplan caught the eye of a 64-
year-old Abel Gance at the Cinémathèque Française. She became his
mistress and collaborator. While it wasn’t an official apprenticeship,
he agreed to teach her to direct and she was an essential personal
and professional right-hand: assistant and second unit director,
confidante, promoter, actress, and muse. She wrote a set diary of
the making of Austerlitzand remained a loyal disciple long after
their tempestuous relationship ended, paying homage to Napoleon,
Gance’s magnum opus, with both a monograph and documentary.
At the same time, Kaplan became involved with the surrealists,
having affairs with both André Breton and Philippe Soupault.
She began to work as a columnist and television commentator in
France, holding forth on film, art, and literature. She wrote a
collection of surrealist short stories under the pen name Belen,
which she would later use for an erotic novel. As her relation-
ship with Gance waned, she began directing her own short
documentaries about artists, culminating in Le regard Picasso
(The Picasso Look, 1967). All before making her acclaimed first
feature, 1969’s A Very Curious Girl.
Laura Mulvey began a recent introduction to A Very Curious
Girlat Light Industry by noting that Kaplan was a “larger than
life character, very conscious of herself as a liberated woman beforewomen’s liberation was ever conceived of... very conscious of her
beauty and charisma.” Consciousness of beauty and charisma is
the central currency in Kaplan’s work, where sexual relationships
are often brutally transactional and the women are never passive
in their own affairs. Kaplan writes of her early relationships, “the
encounters with Gance-Breton-Soupault were of capital importance.
We brought each other an intense intellectual exaltation.” To cast
Kaplan as a naïf, mentored by great men, seems like the type of trap
a man would fall into in one her films. Critic Joan Dupont describes
the director’s presence in terms worthy of one of Kaplan’s heroines:
at the Argentine Cinémathèque, “she was a regular there, and she
was smashing”; she “conquered Gance.” In Kaplan’s world, men
underestimate self-possessed women at their own peril.
In her screwball kidnapping-gone-wrong farce, Papa, the Lil’
Boats(1971), Sheila White plays Vénus “Cookie” de Palma, the
ditzy, bon vivant daughter of a shipping magnate (Sydney
Chaplin). Abducted by a bumbling crew of low-level hoods,
Cookie works the angles available to her: seducing the oafish
Hippolyte (played by Michel Lonsdale, styled like Meat Loaf ) and
cocky Luc, stoking suspicion in the canny Marylène, stroking the
ego of the outmatched ringleader Marc (Michel Bouquet), and
playing the odds on her father’s affection. Kaplan takes full
advantage of White’s doe eyes, hammy mug, and penchant for
slapstick physical comedy. Her cons aren’t particularly convincing
to anyone but her marks, but that’s all it takes. One by one, she
maneuvers Luc to kill Hippolyte, Marylène to kill Luc, and so on,
until she’s the last one standing, with her father’s ransom safely
buried for later retrieval. Cookie ends the film driving off with
father, whose relief at her return is mixed with pride that his
daughter has likely foxed him out of a ransom. His little party girl
might make a cunning capitalist after all.
In A Very Curious Girl, Bernadette Lafont’s Marie adopts aClockwise from top left:
Charles and Lucie,
Néa, Nelly Kaplan,
The Pleasure of Love,
Papa, the Lil’ Boats| BY NELLIE KILLIAN
BURN IT ALL DOWN
NELLY KAPLAN’S FEARLESS FILMS LAY WASTE TO THE BATTLEGROUND OF THE SEXES
WITH REMORSELESS SATIRE THAT HASN’T ALWAYS BEEN GREETED WITH A SMILE