Puzzle of a Downfall Child, the first film by Jerry Schatzberg (he would go on to direct notable New Hollywood entries The Panic in Needle Park and Scarecrow), has taken a long and circuitous path towards its current status as “significant second tier seventies film worth a look.” Released on December 16 1970, it was greeted with largely indifferent and occasionally condescending reviews. Partly this was a function of the fact that Schatzberg was crossing over – he was a well-known high-fashion photographer (who had also shot the iconic cover of Dylan’s Blond on Blonde) – and there was natural skepticism as to whether he should be venturing from the shallow end of the cultural pool. These wary predispositions were only reinforced by Schatzberg’s situating Puzzle in the milieu of the world of fashion photography (with the photographer character as the only nice guy in the movie—got it), and the more laudable but nevertheless alienating decision to keep all of the other compromised characters less than audience-friendly.
Nevertheless, Puzzle of a Downfall Child has some real seventies film bona-fides. It was written by Carole Eastman (her follow up to Five Easy Pieces), shot by Polish emigre Adam Holender (fresh off his debut as a key collaborator on John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy), and starring Faye Dunaway, one of the essential performers of the New Hollywood (e.g. Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor, Network, um, wow)—and she delivers an outstanding performance here. Puzzle also highlights an early example of that anxious seventies motif (the ominously rolling reels of a tape recorder), boasts a gentle new-wavy fracturing of time (the story is told largely in overlapping flashback that features some smartly surreal sequences) and, as noted, is populated by some deeply flawed comers (has Roy Scheider ever played a character this unpleasant?)
Still, few took the picture seriously at the time. (An exception was Molly Haskell, who conceded, “If I like the film in some ways more than “Five Easy Pieces,” it is because it is less pleased with itself, less glib, and less aggressively effective.”) But Puzzle’s reputation has grown over the years—Canadian filmmaker and provocateur Bruce LaBruce offers a particularly spirited endorsement of the film, which challenged his “understanding of what a narrative, relatively mainstream cinema could be.”
If plot you must have, then let it be said that Puzzle is the story of the rise and precipitous fall of Lou Andreas Sand (Dunaway—surely there is a reason she has a masculine first name, but we’ve yet to crack that), and her photographer friend Aaron who she has long treated, not malevolently, but with unreflective selfish indifference. Arron (Barry Primus, loosely based on Schatzberg, though the director insists that in key details the story is fictional, and largely attributable to Eastman) has come to visit the beach house of a reclusive, convalescing, Lou. Aaron imagines there might be a film to be made of her life story, replete as it is with sexual confusion (and not the good sexual confusion), and struggles with mental illness (from which she has clearly not fully recovered).
Puzzle of a Downfall Child, however, is not much about story (which is to take nothing away from Eastman, who delivered one of her trademark “promise me you’ll burn this” 300 page first drafts and is responsible for the movie’s best lines). It is a film defined by character study and visual style, which converge especially well over Lou’s descent into madness—the presentation of which is impressive for its ambitious yet relatively restrained effectiveness in dealing with a topic that too easily and too often lends itself to scenery-chewing and exaggeration. This achievement is particularly attributable to Dunaway’s remarkable performance.
But let us not over-sell the picture, which has its limitations, and is particularly handicapped by the fact that at no point do we have any emotional investment in Lou, or, really, for any of this impeccably coiffed but ultimately motley crew of self-obsessed characters. But fans of the seventies film will want to catch up with this one at some point.
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