I Would Like to See It: Fedora

“I suppose you think me a vain old woman,” says the titular actress and movie star (Hildegard Knef) in the final moments of Billy Wilder’s Fedora. Her one-time suitor Barry Detweiler (William Holden) kisses her hand with melancholy respect before departing, but offers no opinion on the statement. She is, of course. Her vanity ate through her body like acid and left her an embittered, disfigured husk of a woman before turning its attention to the daughter she’d never before shown any real love or affection (Marthe Keller). Yet vanity of that magnitude, delusion so strong it could swallow a child’s life whole and feel neither guilt nor remorse, demands its own species of deference. Where in Wilder’s earlier Sunset Boulevard Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is kept prisoner by her own desperate desire to believe in her long-faded stardom, Fedora’s actual fame eclipses her very existence or lack thereof.

From the dilapidated villas and sun-baked streets of Corfu to the leaden pallor of Paris, Wilder tells an expert color story without ever upstaging his famously lively dialogue or the compelling performances of Knef, Holden, Keller, and Mario Adorf’s colorful Greek hotel manager. Faded grandeur, antiseptic and unnatural medical sterility, the convalescent torpor of the island villa and the waxy, funereal motionlessness of the Parisian mansion in which the film ends — there is a sense of staged fatalism to all of it, a feeling that all of this exists to frame not a woman but the idea of one so famous and so celebrated that her stardom stepped free even of her body and went walking on its own beneath the hazy cerulean sky of Corfu, as immortal as it is helpless.

Even at a technical level the film, for practical reasons, creates a mystical link between mother and daughter: both are overdubbed by German actress Inga Bunsch to conceal that Knef and Keller sounded nothing alike, the editing so seamless that no artifice is detectable at all. If Sunset Boulevard is about glamor in the heart of squalor, Fedora is its mirror image, forcing us to stare into the mirror of our own insatiable lust for stardom until — like the mysterious movie star herself — we can no longer stand the object of our own desire, until there’s nothing left to do but scream until they take away the mirrors and leave only memories in their place.