Classiq - An online journal that celebrates cinema, culture, style and storytelling.

5 March 2020

Jean Seberg’s Look on Screen: A Marker of Modernity

Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in “À bout de souffle”, 1960 | Rialto Pictures, Studio Canal

A preppy in Paris.

After her debut in Hollywood, with her first role, at age nineteen, in Otto Preminger’s 1957 Saint Joan, and another Preminger movie a year later, Bonjour Tristesse, this one filmed in France (both poorly received), Iowa-born Jean Seberg appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s directorial debut, À bout de souffle (1960). Breathless came after the first films of other three emerging New Wave film-makers, Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1955), Claude Chabrol’s Le beau serge (1958) and François Truffaut’s Les 400 coups (1959), but, with Truffaut as screenwriter and Chabrol as technical advisor, it was Godard’s film that marked the definitive breakthrough towards a new language of cinema, one that went against any cinematic conventions, and brought in a new aesthetic, innovative techniques, bold and vigorous narrative, improvised dialogue, leading us through the streets of Paris, mingling actors with passers-by, in a frenetic and realistic pace similar to that of a modern day reporter. A Paris where two lovers are overwhelmed by fate and where the image of Jean Seberg as Patricia Franchini strolling down the Champs-Elysées in The New York Herald Tribune t-shirt became an everlasting style headline and the star of the French New Wave.

After À bout de souffle, Jean Seberg remained in France for much of her adult life and continued to make films both in Hollywood (Lilith, 1964, was one of them, in which she starred opposite Warren Beatty) and Europe (Échappement libre, from 1964, which reunited her with Jean-Paul Belmondo, or Claude Chabrol’s La route de Corinthe, 1967). She corresponded with André Malraux, wore Yves Saint Laurent and played poker with Françoise Sagan, as Rex Reed wrote in a 1969 profile, alluding to a Parisian life revolving around beatniks, art, culture and existentialism. She seemed to have taken on the role from François Sagan, whose heroine she played in Bonjour Tristesse, who breathed fresh air in the hyper-bourgeois France of the 1950s, becoming a symbol of Beat culture cool and postwar affluence, and carry it on through the 1960s.

In a rare interview, which shows Jean (nonchalant, self-assured, natural and fluent in French) in her apartment in Paris, she talked about her rich cultural life she was exposed to living there, where she could easily socialize with artists from so many different fields, but made it clear that she was still an American and that she didn’t want anyone to believe that she was in exile or an expat. However, she stressed out how much she valued that the French respected her privacy as opposed to what her life as a 21-year-old movie star would have looked like in Hollywood. She may have been very young, but she seemed to already have found her voice and was set out to be a marker of modernity.

Jean Seberg makes the subject for the new film Seberg, a political thriller directed by Benedict Andrews and with Kristen Stewart in the lead role, that focuses on Seberg’s post-À bout de souffle life, when she suffered years of harassment and surveillance from the FBI for supporting the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, which presumably lead to her death in 1979, classified as probable suicide. I have my reservations about the film, and Peter Bradshaw makes a very clear reasoning in The Guardian: “But this film also finds it necessary, in the apparent interests of liberal balance, to invent a fictional young FBI officer Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell) who is decent, sensitive, appalled at what his organisation is doing to Seberg and makes a muddled attempt to warn her. But why? Why invent this character at all? Why make the travails of this made-up man dramatically equivalent to Seberg’s very real ordeal? It is a strange contrivance and the film never quite rings true.”

Therefore, instead of looking at Jean Seberg-the character, I am focusing on Jean Seberg’s characters, from Golden Age to Nouvelle Vague. They all ring true. It’s these stories she should be remembered by.

Jean Seberg in “Bonjour Tristesse”, 1958 | Wheel Productions

In Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse, Jean Seberg is the star of the film. “When he organised the ‘Bonjour Tristesse Competition’, Preminger was not looking for Cécile, he was looking for Jean Seberg,” François Truffaut remarked in his book, The Films in My Life, clearly stating his preference for the film and its leading lady over François Sagan’s book and character. “And, when he had found her, it wasn’t a question of whether she was worthy of Cécile, but whether Cécile was worthy of being made real by Jean Seberg.” It was Seberg whom Truffaut considered that Preminger wanted to set in motion, place in her setting, bring out her strong points.

In Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Jean Seberg plays Cécile, the amoral teenage daughter of rich playboy Raymond (David Niven). They are vacationing on the French Riviera and their free-going, pleasure-seeking existence is threatened by her father’s sudden plan to marry his late wife’s best friend, Anne (Deborah Kerr). Cécile plans to drive Anne away, but the plot takes an unexpected turn. George Périnal’s beautiful use of colour affords a striking contrast between the sun-drenched hues of summer in the South of France (the sumptuous villa where the action is mainly set belonged to Pierre Lazareff, the prominent French newspaper editor, and his wife, Hélène Lazareff, the founder of Elle magazine, who made it available to Preminger for filming) and the present, a Paris shot in a chilly black and white – the idyllic holiday compared to the dark reality of the consequences of their vacation.

The clothes dress up Seberg’s character only too well: fresh and striking. Her “wide-open blue eyes” have “a glint of boyish malice,” wrote Truffaut, and “when Jean Seberg is on screen you can’t look at anything else. Her every movement is graceful, each glance is precise. The shape of her head, her silhouette, her walk, everything is perfect; this kind of sex appeal hasn’t been seen on the screen. It is designed, controlled, directed to the nth degree by her director.”

She is a tomboy, a sensuous tomboy. Shirts, men’s shirts to be more exact, are the essential piece of Cécile’s summer wardrobe. She wears shirts stolen from her dad’s wardrobe, a hint at her ties with her father whom she doesn’t want to let go of, and she has a passion for denim shirts, paired with colourful one-piece bathing suits. Her carefree summer look is completed by Breton and gingham tops, boat-neck tops, cropped trousers, shorts slit on the side, white ballerina shoes and flat sandals. When we see her in Paris, she looks completely different dressed in a very elegant, sophisticated black cocktail dress (by Givenchy, who designed part of Seberg’s wardrobe for the film, while costume designer Hope Bryce was responsible for the rest of her outfits). True, so is the location and occasion, but the strikingly different looks mark something much deeper, the loss of innocence that occurred after that fateful summer, the theme of the child-woman and her sadness at approaching adulthood. That’s the film’s narrative, which is so effectively previewed from the very beginning, in the lyrical title sequence of Saul Bass that “exclusively captures the elusive delicacy as well as the sadness that lies at the heart of the film,” writes design historian Pat Kirkham in the book Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design.

Truffaut interestingly said that “If Preminger were making Bonjour Tristesse today” (ed. note: 1978 was the year when Truffaut’s book was published), “he’d probably have Yves Saint Laurent do the costumes.” Seberg’s modernist attitude and style, both on and off screen, would have found a liberating form of expression in Saint Laurent’s clothes, who Truffaut considered “the greatest cinephile among the fashion designers”, who “really understood what cinema costumes had to be like, and he designed them both for their movement and style.” Jean Seberg would eventually wear Yves Saint Laurent on screen, in 1965, in Mervyn LeRoy’s Moment to Moment (1965), the fashion designer’s foray into cinema, two years before Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour that marked the beginning of one of the most significant actress-fashion designer partnerships, Catherine Deneuve-Yves Saint Laurent, one of their films together including Truffaut’s La siréne du Mississippi (1969).

Jean Seberg in “Bonjour Tristesse”, 1958 | Wheel Productions

Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, at its 60th anniversary this year, was not only one of the first films to set off one of the most important cinematic movements in the world, but also one that would have an impact on fashion and that would beguile international audiences to this day. The French New Wave films exquisitely captured the life of the young in France and especially in Paris, the fashion, the urban professional life, the ideological struggles, the carefree minds, the spirit of youth. Raymond Cauchetier, also known as the photographer of the New Wave, captured through his lens enduring moments that Godard’s shoot only implied. There is a scene on the Champs-Élysées, filmed in long shot and from overhead, in which Godard has Seberg give Belmondo a sweet peck on the cheek. Cauchetier brought the actors together to reproduce the scene in a close-up, which became one of the movie’s iconic images despite not existing in the film at all. Cauchetier caught the film’s immediacy and free-form style, as well as the star power, ease and effervescence of Seberg and Belmondo throughout the shoot.

That ease is spoken through their costumes, too. The film does not credit any costume designer for the wardrobes. It is very likely that Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg made their own sartorial choices or even wore their own clothes on set. He set the standard for smoky French sex appeal, and she, with her infusion of French chic into her American sporty, preppy style (just like Seberg in real life), finally made a big entrance on screen and would be admired and copied by the worldwide public for generations to come, creating the stereotype of the French gamine. She is all light and cool and mischief. Patricia Franchini, an American student working for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune in Paris, made style news with her pixie haircut, black eyeliner and a wardrobe packed with sailor stripes, oversized men’s shirts, ballet slippers, loafers, trench coat, skinny pants and Trilby hat borrowed from Jean-Paul Belmondo/Michel.

In another rare interview talking about the movie, taken just before shooting a scene in À bout de souffle, Jean, dressed in the striped dress that Patricia wears in the film, said that Godard described her character as “the one in Bonjour Tristesse two years later”. Godard was a cinephile and when he went from the front of the camera as editor of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, to behind the camera as a film-maker, he frequently made allusions to his director peers whom he admired. There are many “film in film” sequences in Breathless, such as the one when Patricia hides in a cinema, the famous Le Mac Mahon, from the police, and the show that they are announcing next is Preminger’s very own Whirlpool (1949).

Further discussing her character, Seberg depicted her as “a very franchised American girl, a very sophisticated American girl, I suppose what some would call a very liberated American girl” and further concluded that she was one of the first Americans to speak French in a French movie. Belmondo was one of the anti-heroes of La nouvelle vague and she was the anti-heroine of this new cinema that had new life in it, that questioned the establishment, that wanted to experiment in new ways with everything. It’s the only way you can find your true identity.

Jean Seberg in “À bout de souffle”, 1960 | Rialto Pictures, Studio Canal

Posted by classiq in Film, Film costume | | Comments Off

2 March 2020

The Culture Edit: March Newsletter

”Romy” by Marianna Gefen, an exclusive collaboration with Classiq Journal, available on shop.classiq.me

A regular round-up of the latest talks, films,
music, books, interviews and cultural news.

The arrival of spring comes with a new series of portraits of Romy Schneider. The two portraits (here is the second one) are part of our very own collaboration with Russia-born, Berlin-based illustrator Marianna Gefen and they are available exclusively in our shop, either separately or as a set. Here is what the artist says about her “Romy” portraits: “I was inspired by the mysterious aura, grace and charisma which surround Romy Schneider to this day. She is untamed beauty, determined yet fragile, flawed yet real. With different layers, colours, abstract shapes and transparency, I wanted to represent these aspects.”

Writer and illustrator Quentin Blake talks about bringing some of the most cherished children’s characters to life (Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox remains one of my favourite children’s books), about his new book, The Weed (out this week), about self-publishing a series of books, QB Papers – “an excuse for nonsensical drawing, really” – and about the most important book he bought as a teenager. “Reading is the only thing I’ve got a qualification for,” he chuckles (he studied English at Cambridge). “I like drawing for myself but all those books, they’re so different in character… People often ask me where I get my ideas from and I say: ‘I get them from writers.’” That’s why the children will be alright.

Todd Haynes talks to Edith Bowman about Dark Waters, one of the best and most underrated films of last year, inspired by the true story of Robert Bilott (played remarkably by Mark Ruffalo), the attorney who took on the DuPont company in an environmental suit exposing a decades-long history of chemical pollution in West Virginia. It’s stark, and realistic, a great piece of docu-drama. Todd Haynes also has a new film in the making, a documentary about Velvet Underground, which I am very much looking forward to. In the meanwhile, for a healthy dose of rock stories, you can read Nick Kent’s selected writings on rock music (he also writes about Lou Reed, the lead guitarist, singer and songwriter of The Velvet Underground, among many others), and watch Hayne’s Velvet Goldmine, his 1998 film set in Britain in the early rock days of the 1970s.

”My Mother Laughs” by Chantal Akerman | “Dark Waters”, directed by Todd Haynes, 2019 (Focus Features) |
Quentin Blake illustration for his book, “The Weed”

The entire board that oversees the César Academy resigned before this year’s César Awards held on February 28th, in response to the protests against Roman Polanski and his 12 César nominations for J’accuse (An Officer and a Spy). The Academy board declared they “should not take moral positions” in giving awards and that they took this decision because they wanted to “honour those men and women who made cinema happen in 2019, to find calm and ensure that the festival of film remains just that, a festival”. That film festivals and awards should not take moral stands, I completely agree with, and everything else I wanted to say about the enemies of culture and writing I already have in our previous newsletter. Polanski eventually won the César for best director and best adapted screenplay. Which brings me to the recently published book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, by Sam Wasson, which tells the story of the making of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, one of the best films in the history of cinema.

In The Washington Post, Glenn Frankel, who is currently writing a book about New York in the 1960s and the making of Midnight Cowboy, says: “Wasson grounds his account in the intriguing people who made Chinatown: Polanski, Towne, Nicholson and the mercurial Robert Evans, who oversaw the making of the movie while head of production for Paramount. Using these four gifted and complicated men at the zenith of their talents and their egos, Wasson, in “The Big Goodbye,” weaves a tale in a voice that is intimate and sympathetic, yet critical.” When I laid eyes on the book, its title immediately made me think of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. I wonder if Altman’s film, also part of the revisionist films of the 1970s, which came out the year before Chinatown, is intertwined in the story.

This year’s César for best film went to Les Misérables, directed by Ladj Ly, which is not another adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel. It portrays life in a poor Parisian suburb where the police are corrupt and the residents are struggling just to get by. “People may not want to see certain parts of this film, but I’m going to make you see what real life looks like in this neighborhood. I’ve lived through this,” said the director.

In My Mother Laughs, released in the autumn of last year, “among the imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life,” Austrian filmmaker Chantal Akerman places “stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.”

Posted by classiq in Books, Culture, Film, Newsletter | Comments Off

28 February 2020

Riding on the Highest Creative Crests and Living on the Edge of Darkness

“Believe me, the records don’t even begin to capture the special magic of the Dolls on a good night playing in a prissy little club to their elite little crowd of mascara-daubed misfits and vagrant vamps. Misty glitzy memories of the way we were. So cute. So vital. So star-crossed,” Nick Kent writes about the New York Dolls in his selected writings on rock music gathered in The Dark Stuff. About the arrival of The Rolling Stones, Kent says that “they looked simply out of this world, like a new delinquent aristocracy, and they played music of stunning arrogance and unbridled potency,” while “upon falling out of St Mary’s into the outstretched arms of the dole queue in 1975, Steven Morrissey’s life appears to have revolved around the music of the New York Dolls and sixties girl singers, the crucial ‘symbolic’ importance of James Dean, and the continuing lure of the written word.”

The written word is something Kent is really good at, too, and he uses it to great effect to talk about rock, combined with a peering critical eye, an instinct for what is truly great, a devil-may-care attitude towards speaking his mind and a refusal to veneer stardom just for the sake of stardom or just because sometimes greatness comes at the cost of fame. These are intimate not glamorous, sincere not market-driven, stripped-down not sugar-coated portraits of some of the most influential musicians in rock history, be it truly gifted or simply rock stars, authentically dammed youths or legends who lived on to tell their own stories, all of them more or less self-destructive (from Brian Wilson, Brian Jones, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, to Keith Richards, Neil Young, Kurt Cobain and Axel Rose). And it all comes from a man who really knows his stuff as well as he really lived it right along with the ones he writes about. It encapsulates both riding on the highest creative crests and living on the edge of darkness (often at the same time) that come with making rock music and trying to live through it. Hell or high water.

Here are some of the best rock songs mentioned in “The Dark Stuff”.

https://open.spotify.com/user/o2andp6xgqxi4ixeg4zmctj0z/playlist/36F1cgRpZhS9PfUcrDS32o?si=IzvbZ18zRVmk-Q2Vptw6BQ

“The Dark Stuff” is part of the Faber Social, released by Faber & Faber,
a selection of the best writings on music and culture.

More stories: In His Own Words, Morrissey / But Beautiful / M Train

Posted by classiq in Books, Culture, Sounds & Tracks | | Comments Off

24 February 2020

Essential Minimalism: Interview with Illustrator Sandra Suy

Sandra Suy illustration

Soft yet striking. Spare, sharp drawings that unveil fluent ideas and the intent of the performance. Delicate and refined yet graphic and incisive lines that render strong female portraits. Muted shades accentuated by bursts of colour. A flowing minimalism. The illustrations of Barcelona-born artist Sandra Suy have the skill to show what the subject is about without going into great detail. Her natural style evokes both a timeless elegance and a modern sensitivity, creating interest by balancing so well classic beauty with an edgy energy, simplicity with texture. Sandra Suy has collaborated with Chloé, Adidas, Zara, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour, among others, and whenever her drawing verges on other cultural areas, her artwork becomes even more interesting.

In our interview, Sandra talks about why she changed paths from fashion design to illustration and its place in today’s fashion world, about why she currently prefers digital to traditional media, about the image makers she looks up to and names some of her favourite films.

Sandra Suy illustration for Chloé

”I try to express the maximum
with the minimal visual information.”

What is your earliest drawing memory?

I remember myself drawing since I was a little girl… my textbooks were always decorated.

Why fashion illustration? How did it start?

I always liked to draw, and I was very attracted to the world of fashion and design. I studied fashion design, but what really appealed to me was the creative and artistic part and not so much the confection of garments itself. Later I discovered that fashion illustration was the profession that offered what I liked most, both things combined.

Your words remind me of Joe Eula, who was Halston’s creative director in the 1970s and whose sharp eye captured the essence of whatever he was drawing, and the simplicity and spare lines of his illustrations aroused from a need to seek the essence of a garment, to express it in a form that stood up to his ideal. How important do you find this crossover element in fashion illustration? Did the fact that you studied fashion design play a big role in developing your style?

Thanks!
I don’t really think so… I think it is a personal taste, a way of interpreting the world. In every artistic and creative expression there are the most minimalist or baroque tendencies, depending on the creative’s taste. Although, surely, the fact that I studied fashion has affected my way of approaching the illustration of garments, but I’m not sure in what way.

How would you describe your illustrative style?

I try to express the maximum with the minimal visual information. Minimalist?

Sandra Suy illustration

Do you have a preferred medium?

Yes. Digital. But I miss traditional media sometimes. I’m looking forward to using the brushes more often…

So you use technology a lot in your work?

Today it is a big part of my creative process. Technology helps a lot, especially since there is a big difference in the workflow at the level of time spent, especially when you are working with a client, it takes much less time to make changes and speeds up the work.

How challenging is for an artist to do commissioned work? How does it relate to your personal, freelance work?

Sometimes it is quite difficult to keep a balance and keep your style in a commisioned work. The needs of the campaign or the client’s point of view collides with your own style and sometimes it is a challenge to reach a midpoint where everyone is happy with the result. And sometimes it is really easy.

Could you tell me a little about your creative process on any given illustration?

First you have to know what to draw. This may be given by a client, for example, or you just want to draw something for pleasure. In any case, there is a stage of research or inspiration to know the creative direction to take. Once I have decided the inspiration, I make a quick sketch to see if the idea works well. The next step is to work on the final illustration.

Do you keep a sketchbook?

Not really. I’m a little bit chaotic, so usually my sketches are spread over different surfaces and supports. I am not proud of it.

Stella McCartney portrait by Sandra Suy

What qualities separate illustration from photography? I am asking you this because today everybody thinks they can take a photo with their iPhone.

Well, I think that are two different ways to express an artistic point of view… The big difference is that, in an illustration, the illustrator usually decides everything, she/he is the makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, art director… In photography, the control of the entire production is not always assumed by the photographer.

What does an illustrator bring new to fashion? What is the biggest challenge? David Downton said that “fashion illustration is really about absorbing someone else’s creativity and reinterpreting it”. How would you describe the relationship between illustration and fashion, which I, for one, consider much more symbiotic than that of photography and fashion?

I think it is a good definition. Actually, it doesn’t matter if it’s fashion or not, the illustrator reinterprets through his artistic vision whatever the object of inspiration is… in our case (fashion illustrators) is fashion, but on other occasions it can be flowers, or any other inspiration as the subject of reinterpretation.

Have any fashion illustrators, or image makers in general, influenced your work?

René Gruau, Egon Schiele, Ramón Casas, Japanese aesthetic in general, Kenneth Paul Block, and many more.

Illustration by Sandra Suy

”The big difference is that, in an illustration,
the illustrator usually decides everything, she/he is
the makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, art director…”

Sandra Suy illustrations

Any favourite designers?

This is very difficult! Alexander Mcqueen, Miuccia Prada, Schiaparelli, Alessandro Michele, Rei Kawakubo, Margiela…

Gaby Aghion had a visionary mind and took a revolutionary road, dreaming and shaping up a world of fashion for the woman of the present. The kind of femininity Chloé projects is chic, practical, delicate, romantic, young and free, and beautiful on the outside, but also strong, believable, independent and confident, and even more beautiful on the inside. Your Chloé illustrations perfectly captured that feeling. How was your collaboration with the brand?

Surprisingly, it was very easy working with them, they gave me absolute creative freedom to interpret the essence of the brand, and it was a pleasure and I feel very lucky to have had this kind of experience.

Do you have a dream subject? What is it that makes you want to draw something or someone?

I really want to experiment more with the abstract and traditional media.

Sandra Suy illustration

Fashion illustration has been in high demand lately and it can often be seen in collaborations between designers and illustrators, but will it ever be able to recalibrate forces with fashion photography in the high-end magazines as it once was?

I think the two disciplines are complementary, it is possible that there will come a time when they have the same representation within magazines, but it is difficult to know.

In this fast-fashion, fast-living world, there seems to be an increased interest in the hand-made, in craftsmanship, in locally-made products, in mindful shopping, in things with true value. How do you see the future of fashion?

It seems that people are becoming aware that “less quantity and more quality” is better. There is much more ecological awareness and people are more aware when it comes to consuming .. All that will have an impact on the fashion industry in one way or another, consumer habits are changing.

In this time and age, what do you wish people appreciated more?

Maybe go back to the real world and real “timings”. We are all connected to the internet, social media screens, the virtual world, the immediate information… that makes us disconnect from the offline experience.

I am a big movie lover and I would like to ask you if you happen to share an interest in cinema (in regard to your Grace Kelly and La dolce vita illustrations). Any all time favourites?

There are so many! Blade Runner, any of Sofia Coppola’s, In the Mood for Love (this is a classic of the aesthetic), Her, The Handmaiden, Where the Wild Things Are…

La Dolce Vita illustration by Sandra Suy

Sandra Suy on Instagram @sandrasuyillustration | Website: sandrasuy.com

Posted by classiq in Art, Fashion, Interviews | | Comments Off

20 February 2020

Renaissance Woman and Dance Hall Days in the Alienated City

Fashion, music and attitude in To Live and Die in L.A.

William Petersen in ”To Live and Die in L.A.”, 1985 | SLM Production Group, United Artists

Special Service agent Richard Chance (William Petersen) approaches both his job and his life with reckless abandon, throwing caution to the wind whether he is chasing a criminal or base-jumping when he is off-duty. His badge and gun give him license not only to consider himself above the law, but above life and death, too. He and his partner, Jim Hart (Michael Greene), are on the trail of a group of counterfeiters in Los Angeles. When Hart is murdered two days before his retirement, Chance throws himself into hunting down the forger Eric Masters (Willem Dafoe), even if this may very well make him a criminal, too. His new partner, John Vukovich (John Pankow), is at first uneasy about Chance’s addiction to danger and living fast, but he is eventually caught in this vicious ride, and in the end, through an inspired, unexpected twist, Vukovich assumes the persona of Chance.

In To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), no character is entirely bad or good, everyone has a counterfeit motive. The distinction between good and evil, between law and crime, between duty and art tends to be eroded. It is the neo-noir, and neon-noir, attitude of William Friedkin’s anti-hero, as the filmmaker goes for the darker side of each character. We all have it in ourselves.

Los Angeles is one of the main characters of the story, and is depicted as a disquieting and faceless place, a city of towering silhouettes and factory chimneys dissolving into a misty red glow, of nameless streets and gritty neighborhoods, of paved-over riverbed and cars and highways and no souls, resembling more a waste land than a city of stars, “with no landmarks, no iconic skylines or neighborhoods,” as Friedkin noted in his memoir, The Friedkin Connection. Inspired by Gerald Petievich’s novel, who aroused Friedkin’s interest because of the “surrealist nature of the life of a Secret Service agent”, this is a film with an extraordinary atmospheric density and a dark sensibility, with unexpected things in it, uncompromising, with no guarantees of plot line or character life span.

From the top: 1.Renaissance Woman: Debra Feuer in ”To Live and Die in L.A.”, 1985; 2.Los Angeles, a character in itself in the film; 3.William Petersen approaches both work and life with reckless abandon | SLM Production Group, United Artists

The characters are observed from afar, too. Their private lives are reduced to rendezvous in neon-lit clubs and bars, or having sex in steely, impersonal spaces. We never see Chance at home, we only see him visiting his informant, parolee Ruth Lanier (Darlanne Fluegel), whom he casually has sex with, too. That may be her apartment (Friedkin let Darlanne hang out in there and even take part in decorating it in order for her to get a feel of the place), but we don’t get to see her son, whom she briefly mentions as living with his father. We never get to see any family member of any of the characters, every personal detail is kept aside, Friedkin forgoes any kind of interiority. Bodies may be shown in full display, but there is no feeling of closeness. Everything we see is a front, and beyond these whisper-thin surfaces, there is only darkness. Relationships are interchangeable, people are replaceable, it is a world out of control, a counterfeit world. Living in L.A. is portrayed as being “about counterfeit emotions, counterfeit money, counterfeit structure of the law, counterfeit relationships,” in Friedkin’s own words, “it’s a metaphor for a lot of what I’ve seen in the years that I’ve been at work in Los Angeles.”

There is nothing kitschy, and it could easily have been, about the art-heavy sequences (Masters has an artistic side which is based on German painter Rainer Fetting, whose art we see in the film, and he’s also passionate about avant-garde dance performances), the settings with flourishing lights, the synthesized soundtrack, and even the neon-hued opening credits. Instead, they all paint a world that is hypnotic, mystical and overpowering.

According to William Friedkin, the main reason he chose Wang Chung to compose the soundtrack was because the band stood out “from the rest of contemporary music… What they finally recorded has not only enhanced the film, it has given it a deeper, more powerful dimension.” They wrote and recorded every song of the soundtrack within two weeks, except for two songs, “Dance Hall Days”, the title song, and “Wait”, which Friedkin specifically required from the band’s previous album, Points on the Curve. It’s a gripping and exhilarating soundtrack that only enhances the magnetic and unreal mood of the film, a great example of how a film evokes a feeling without constantly reminding you that it is not reality that you are watching, and that’s even more enticing.

Debra Feuer in ”To Live and Die in L.A.”, 1985 | SLM Production Group, United Artists

Fourteen years after The French Connection marked the beginning of a new era of gritty, urban police dramas revolving around hard-bitten, morally ambiguous cops, Friedkin left the streets of New York and went for “something more in the unisex style of Los Angeles in the 1980s” in To Live and Die in L.A. He wanted a “feminine sensibility” for the film. Debra Feuer, who played Bianca Torres, the lover of Willem Dafoe’s artist/counterfeiter, recounted how everything she wore in the film came from her own wardrobe. Friedkin wanted her to wear the clothes he saw her in whenever she arrived on set. And it shows. How about that for an authentic feel of the time and character? The film is so much imbedded in that time, in the rebellious angst of the 80s, with its style more flea market than high fashion.

Debra’s, and therefore Bianca’s, style may very well be a mix of hand-me-downs and cast-offs, loose fitting sweaters and blouses with rolled-up sleeves, high-rise fitted jeans, biker leather jackets, cowboy boots and messenger bags. It was the supremacy of the DIY style. It was the height of individuality. This is not about power dressing, as in the style of the boardroom as status symbol of women running big business, one of the characteristics of 1980s fashion. It is about an empowered attitude that does not need brand clothes to stand out, it is about style subversion, a rugged edge to fashion, a riotous energy born in the streets.

William Petersen and John Pankow in ”To Live and Die in L.A.”, 1985 | SLM Production Group, United Artists

Style is something deeply personal and everyone holds his/her own. Richard Chance’s addiction to thrill and danger shows in his clothes: broken-in jeans, biker jacket, unbuttoned tucked-in shirts, varsity sweater, plain t-shirts, a green parka, sneakers and scuffed work boots, clothes that must afford him freedom of movement and of the mind. He packs a lot into his life (and I don’t mean clothing), as if sensing he won’t be around for too long. There is a sequence that I found very funny, clothing-wise. When he goes to see the prosecutor to ask him to bend the rules in his pursuit of catching Masters, he wears a tie. It is so out of tune with the shirt and leather jacket that it’s clear that the only message he wants to project is that he doesn’t conform even when he pretends to do it. He’s fearless and defiant. It’s in his nature. And it’s so powerful that his new partner Vukovich comes to embody it, too, making a final and definitive shift from ill-fitted blazers and unflattering trousers to leather and denim, and to an aura of danger.

Editorial sources: The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir, by William Friedkin / interviews and featturets with William Friedkin, William Petersen, Willem Dafoe, Debra Feuer, John Pankow, Jack Hues and Nick Feldman of Wang Chung, and other cast and crew members of the film available on the special features on the Blu-ray edition of the movie released by Shout! Factory

More stories: The Art of Film Poster: Interview with Illustrator Tony Stella / Gloria: Gena Rowlands Means Business Dressed in Emanuel Ungaro / Kim Basinger’s Individualistic Minimalism in Nine 1/2 Weeks

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