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Pauline Kael On Jane Fonda in Klute

Jane Fonda's performance as a call girl in Klute was praised for her ability to disappear fully into the role of Bree. Fonda portrayed Bree as confident yet vulnerable when alone, in a complex performance that transformed clinical understanding of prostitution into human understanding. Fonda's performance as Bree was described as perhaps the first major film attempt to do so, and established her as one of the strongest female characters and most brilliant young dramatic actresses in American film at the time.

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442 views1 page

Pauline Kael On Jane Fonda in Klute

Jane Fonda's performance as a call girl in Klute was praised for her ability to disappear fully into the role of Bree. Fonda portrayed Bree as confident yet vulnerable when alone, in a complex performance that transformed clinical understanding of prostitution into human understanding. Fonda's performance as Bree was described as perhaps the first major film attempt to do so, and established her as one of the strongest female characters and most brilliant young dramatic actresses in American film at the time.

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yasaman kashef bahrami
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We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Pauline Kael on Jane Fonda in Klute

"Jane Fonda's motor runs a little fast. As an actress, she has a special kind of smartness that takes the
form of speed; she's always a little ahead of everybody, and this quicker beat--this quicker
responsiveness--makes her more exciting to watch. This quality works to great advantage in her full-
scale, definitive portrait of a call girl in Klute. It's a good, big role for her, and she disappears into Bree,
the call girl, so totally that her performance is very pure--unadorned by "acting." As with her defiantly
self-destructive Gloria in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, she never stands outside Bree, she gives
herself over to the role, and yet she isn't lost in it--she's fully in control, and her means are
extraordinarily economical. She has somehow got to a plane of acting at which even the closest closeup
never reveals a false thought and, seen on the movie streets a block away, she's Bree, not Jane Fonda,
walking toward us.

"The center of the movie is the study of the temperament and the drives of this intelligent, tough high-
bracket call girl who wants to quit.... Though there have been countless movie prostitutes, this is
perhaps the first major attempt to transform modern clinical understanding into human understanding
and dramatic meaning. The conception may owe some debt to the Anna Karina whore in My Life to Live,
but Bree is a much more ambivalent character. She's maternal and provocative with her customers,
confident and contemptuously cool; she's a different girl alone--huddled in bed in her disorderly room.
The suspense plot involves the ways in which prostitutes attract the forces that destroy them. Bree's
knowledge that as a prostitute she has nowhere to go but down and her mixed-up efforts to escape
make her one of the strongest feminine characters to reach the screen. It's hard to remember that this
is the same actress who was the wide-eyed, bare-bottomed Barbarella and the anxious blond bride in
Period of Adjustment and the brittle, skittish girl in the broad-brimmed hat of The Chapman Report; I
wish Jane Fonda could divide herself in two, so we could have new movies with that naughty-innocent
comedienne as well as with this brilliant, no-nonsense dramatic actress. Her Gloria invited comparison
with Bette Davis in her great days, but the character of Gloria lacked softer tones, shading, variety. Her
Bree transcends the comparison; there isn't another young dramatic actress in American films who can
touch her...."

Pauline Kael

The New Yorker, July 3, 1971

Deeper Into Movies, p. 280-81

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