WHO ARE YOU POLLY MAGGOO?

What was I doing in 1966 that made me miss seeing William Klein’s surrealist satire on the fashion world ‘Who Are You Polly Maggoo’? I guess better late than never, although after viewing it I realize that like me, the movie has not aged well with time.  What the critics back then hailed as a biting and fiercely funny deconstruction of a fashion industry that took itself too seriously, now seems like an over-spent frenzy that tried way too hard as it over intellectualized its lampooning of French new wave cinema as well as fashion folk too.

The movie entered my radar when I saw a clip of it in the new Diana Vreeland documentary ‘The Eye Must Travel’.  Klein, a designer cum artist, had drifted into photography in the 1960’s and his bizarre style annoyed the artistic elite but attracted the attention of Ms. Vreeland who hired him.  She is undisguised as the role model for the Fashion Editor in ‘Polly Maggoo’ who declares the outrageous dresses made out of aluminum and paraded in a Fashion Show as sensational and that the designer was a genius for ‘reinventing women’!

The plot of the movie is not that important which is somewhat of a relief as it is nigh on impossible to make sense of it.  Polly, a Brit living in Paris, is one of the models from the opening scene's Fashion Show and she is pursued by every man she ever meets who falls in love with her looks, including a TV Producer who is making her the subject of his next programme, and the Prince of an obscure small Russian Country who has only seen her photograph in a magazine and but still declares that she will be his princess.  Not so much a Fairy Tale Romance but more a Ludicrous Fantasy.

What Klein focuses on is a manic frenetic pace when nothing on the screen stops still for a minute: a very obvious pre-cursor to today’s MTV. His rapid caustic wit targets the seemingly pretentiousness of the modern cinema movement of the time, but actually this movie by using all the same techniques, ends up being a part of that very same new wave. You have this underlying feeling that in spirit this is a very funny film, but you never actually laugh at all. And its just falls way too short to qualify to become a camp classic.

The best I can say, is that I’ve seen it and that’s another one off my cinephile list of ‘must see’s.   And then it all came back to me, and I remembered what I saw instead in 1966 : ‘Georgy Girl’, ‘Alfie’, ‘Blow Up’, ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’, ‘Inside Daisy Clover’ etc.  And I went to the UK Premiere of  ‘The Property is Condemned’ with the stars in attendance.  'Polly Maggoo' would have been no replacement for me seeing Miss Natalie Wood in person.  

★★★★★