TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

PoppyTransfusion I thought that Pasolini's film "Salò o le 120 Diornate di Sodoma" was the best portrait of depravity I would see but this film exceeds "Salo". It is entitled "The Important Thing is to Love" because love is the sole good thing one can do amidst a world of utter ugliness where the sum of a man is "the ugliest things he can do".Żuławski has created a film replete with sadness, melancholy, grief and misery and it is crafted so well that it is dazzling and, at times, beautiful. He is well assisted by his cast of actors, including his three beautiful leads, and the film's composer Georges Delerue, whose signature tune haunts the film as a discordant plaint.The film depicts the relationship of a married couple to a man who becomes infatuated with the wife. They share the world of acting, film and pornography and each is a 'prostitute' in their own way. The husband, Jacques, is suicidally depressed and finds himself outside of life and not willing to enter life and engage. His wife, Nadine, is a broken personality who feels that Jacques saved her and she desires an acting career whilst making money as a porn star. Servais is a loner with a broken father; he has become involved with a porn/sex wheeler dealer, Mazelli, who is a gangster of sorts. All yearn to break free from the world they inhabit and Servais's plan, paying to have Nadine cast as Lady Anne in an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Richard III", seems a possible means of release. Like Richard III, the film's characters are somewhat deformed yet they are less ugly in their deformities than the superficially glamorous world they inhabit. Of course Servais's plan fails. Words attributed to Rimbaud, which are the final words of Servais's late friend who died from liver failure, capture the tormented pains of the characters:"Turmoil originated your poetry/ Immense forces served you/ Your entrails burst, death menaces/ Chosen City!/ Consume your shrieks In the deaf trumpet."The film's themes seem clearer than the characters and their dense opaqueness. It is a series of brief, fast changing scenes that I found jarring, perhaps the intent to underline discord and distress. It is like one long howl. It is powerful and almost perfect.

b-jacobsons I'm not surprised to read here at IMDb that Romy called this her best work. She leads a cast of irresistible losers (Dutronc, Kinski, Testi) in the wholly believable debauchery that is so truly the amoral dilemma of the profession Maugham has called "THE show business". The physical electricity of these performers is such that I came away from it thirty years ago thinking that Miss Schneider was Brando's doppelganger. Or perhaps she WAS Brando! After all, they were never seen together, were they? If acting may be defined as the truthful response to fictional stimuli, then this film, which, by the way, must be screening daily in both Heaven and Hell, was perhaps shot in one cosmic take. These actors display - seamlessly - their bodies, their appetites, their loves, egos, ids and superegos. Never mind the sadness, life is for learning.

audrius-darguzis A very simple, and (thus) extremely powerful film. And, sadly, underrated. It's a mind-opening experience. It doesn't say anything new or different on the subject, its simplicity and consistence shows loud and clear that...love is nothing but pain, but it's the only thing worth fighting (living; feeling pain) for; the only thing that sets you free. When Schneider's personage finds an earlier repulsive photograph dying in his desolated apartment you get to feel that now she cannot not love him... A very sincere, believable, touching film resembling real life and real love. Every actor's work is praise-worth, and worth the film's title. They knew what each of them were talking about. And no wonder Kinski took part in this. (The mood of this film is somehow similar to Last Tango in Paris.) You can almost feel wounded along with these 'people' that are being thrashed by love.

StephaneD Beautiful movie of three persons seeking to live, love and survive... Romy Schneider's performance is stunning as a porn actress desperately in love with a man who doesn't wish to live anymore, and resisting the seduction of a photograph. The picture is pretty "intellectual", but not boring. Soundtrack is fabulous...A great 70's melodrama. And what a pleasure to see Kinski!Must see.