L'important c'est d'aimer (aka: "That Most Important Thing: Love")

A Defiant Reality

The earliest Andrzej Żuławski film I've seen to date, L'important c'est d'aimer [The Important Thing Is to Love, 1975] has made me a fan of the Polish/French director for certain; where I had anticipated jerky handheld-shot nihilistic images and wing-it scenarios, instead exists complex 'storytelling' and mise-en-scène. Two items of note before I get a little more into the movie proper:

(1) That term "mise-en-scène" seems within the last year or so to have pervaded the realms of even casual film-buffs. Its usage sometimes hits the spot; other times it's employed as a kind of synonym for 'cinematic style via camera motion, framing, and lighting; visuals.' Which isn't far off, but some day I'd like to write a piece that really gets at it. Real quickly: "Mais mise-en-scène, c'est la mise-en-scène et ça c'est l'importante."

(2) The pronunciation of the director's name. A problem for basically everyone who possesses even a scintilla of Polish language pronunciation and its panoply of diacritics that transform the assumed English pronunciation of the city of Lodz ("lodz") into Łódź ("woodj"). So let's take it in: the pronunciation of "Żuławski" in English-equivalent registers as: "Dzu-WAF-skee," and not "Zu-LAW-skee." Now back to our program.

This Romy Schneider-starring 'tale' of an acclaimed actress of stage and screen involves her being loved by two men: her live-in husband played by Jacques Dutronc, and a paparazzo lover portrayed by Fabio Testi. A warning for the misophonians among viewers (which includes myself to a minor extent) — the screaming German bitch director on the set of the film-shoot in progress that bookends L'important, and Dutronc's French theatrics in and out of kitchen and bedroom — constitute an onslaught of waveform peaks in-the-red neutralized perhaps only by the equivalent volume of Klaus Kinski's fascinating recitation of a monologue from Shakespeare's Richard III, during a rehearsal for the stage production in which Schneider also participates.

Georges Delerue granted in advance to Żuławski and the production his originally-used theme from Godard's 1963 Contempt with its interweave of melancholy, sexual compulsion, and underlying death-ward trajectory, thereby by both initiating and completing the film's cinephile program. •

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