Event

KLUTE

In her first film of this pivotal decade, Fonda gave her most exalted performance as Bree Daniels, a Hells Kitchendwelling sex worker and aspiring thespian being stalked by a sociopath. The initial installment of director Pakulas paranoia trilogy of the 70s, Klute most strongly bears the authorial stamp of its lead actress, here brilliantly plumbing dread, bravado, and the irreconcilable feelings she has for Donald Sutherlands laconic private investigator. (Metrograph)

I think about Jane Fonda as a performer who fluidity moved through stages of constant reinvention. Somebody could take a very cynical read about that, still holding her anti-war activism against her or find her to have been a sell-out for becoming an icon of exercise video. It is kind of fascinating that there are these polarities of taking her activism so seriously that it still drives people to anger but then there are people who are turned off by her supposed artifice. She is somehow too real or too fake for people and I cannot really think as both a performer and a person you can ever really be neutral about Jane Fonda. But I was drawn to her as somebody who could lose herself in the right performance which, in fact, turned out to be about a performer risking losing herself- at the hands of somebody else, a near existential threat for most of the film- when she is having a moment of some genuine self-discovery about herself. It is truly one of the great performances of the era, something that should not be buried in a decade of the male-dominant New American Cinema. Gena Rowlandss performances get a lot of love from this period but I think Fonda in Klute is in that echelon and hopefully more people discover [it]. - Caden Gardner