Although the internationally popular Romy Schneider won a Cesare Award for her performance as a not-so-popular actress in this Andrej Zulawski-directed 1975 sleaze-fest, it’s really beloved French pop-singer-turned-actor Jacques Dutronc that steals scene after scene here. His quirky and affecting turn as the ambiguously gay, passive-aggressive husband of Schneider’s character Nadine adds some tragicomic nuance to this otherwise lurid, unforgiving urban nightmare of a tale. Longtime French starling Romy Schneider casts off her usual glamor to play fading thespian Nadine, who’s ashamed by her increasing dependence on softcore porn roles and getting bossed around by trash-purveying demagogic directors. On a film shoot, by happenstance, Nadine meets a strong-but-silent-type photographer Servais (Fabio Testi) who insists on taking nude stills of her to make a few francs on the side from the tabloids. Soon, Servais becomes obsessed with Nadine and starts to encroach on her squalid homelife in serious ways. The real kicker comes when Servais borrows money from a filmmaker-mobster to basically buy Nadine a respectable role in an underground production of Richard III, which ends up, not surprisingly, an embarrassing flop that does nothing to check Nadine’s career spiral. In this warped story of unrequited love and ambition, there’s certainly a lurid Last Tango in Paris vibe that makes the viewer feel like a voyeur instead of simply taking in a cinematic spectacle. You feel just as debauched as the characters in the film—a feeling enhanced of course by the film’s purposefully unglamorous location filming: this is a Paris of seedy backstreets, unhygienic crash pads, quasi-gangster guttersnipes, and filthy money. The fact that the cast includes the unmistakably Dionysian presence of Klaus Kinski, who here plays an amoral, aristocratic German actor, can only add to the sense of bohemian anarchy running throughout this genuinely bizarre, pessimistic tragedy. Highly Recommended. (M. Sandlin)