Puzzle of a Downfall Child

Lou Andreas Sand was once a well known model. Now she lives alone in a house by the sea. A photographer friend visits her and switches on a tape recorder. She begins to talk: arriving in New York, the first shoots, the agencies, the men, the pills and being put in hospital. As she talks the order breaks down; she tells the same event twice in two different ways and does not know herself which is true. Jerry Schatzberg directs. Faye Dunaway plays Lou. Schatzberg was a fashion photographer before he made films, and the screenplay rests on a real person: the tape recordings of a model he had worked with who later lost her mental health. The narrative does not run straight; the recordings, the returns to the past and passages of fantasy are folded together, and the film does not mark which is which. The subject is not the fashion world but what becomes of someone built entirely around a gaze once that gaze is withdrawn. It counts among Faye Dunaway's hardest parts and the performance was much discussed at the time. It attracted little interest on release and was unavailable for a long time; it was later restored and reassessed. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies American cinema and fragmented narrative. Who it is not for: the structure is demanding, it is hard to identify with the character, and the film offers no explanation.