I Would Like to See It: Klute

Among the fast-talking, hard-nosed, sexually aggressive ranks of film’s great noir detectives, its Marlowes and Gitteses, its Spades and Diamonds, John Klute (Donald Sutherland) is an oddity. He is soft-spoken and reserved, not sexless but not smooth either, and his lack of resources is neither dire nor romantic but rather a simple matter of circumstance. He never fires his gun. He doesn’t kill the bad guy. In fact he fairly fades into the wallpaper next to Jane Fonda’s electric, Oscar-winning turn as successful call girl/failed actress Bree Daniels, but that’s not to say he’s boring. As Klute, Sutherland anchors the film, playing perfectly off Fonda’s room-filling energy and rangy, restless sexiness with his still body language and long, melancholy features. In their first sexual encounter she slips into his trundle bed in the middle of the night, grinding against him, bare thigh caught in a strip of light falling through the street-level window of his basement room, he’s in cotton pajamas and asleep when she initiates intimacy, symbolically infantilized on every level.

Fonda’s sexual competence as Daniels is almost overwhelming. During a sequence with her aging client Mr. Goldfarb (Morris Strassberg) she invents a story about playing baccarat in Monaco with mercenaries and exiled royalty so engrossing that if it weren’t for the sharp, melodious strings of Michael Small’s score it feels as though time might stop as she speaks of warm sand and smoldering stares, of sultry nights and dark gaming parlors and the touch of a mysterious stranger. “Nothing is wrong,” she tells her clients over and over throughout the film, both in the moment and in recordings. It sounds true. She can invoke a moment isolated from the rest of the world, a place where shame does and doesn’t exist, where nothing is wrong except what it feels good to be wrong about. The film’s politics around sex work are assuredly thorny, but Fonda worked extensively with real call girls, and it shows.

It helps that director Alan J. Pakula frames both characters with almost fetishistic attention to detail. Mirrors. Sketches. Figures slipping in and out of the backgrounds of shots, all of it so carefully arranged as to appear totally effortless and natural, just as the film’s script is so smooth and the flow with which the cast deliver their lines so natural as to feel almost more than real. The clutter of Bree’s apartment. The Spartan emptiness of Klute’s. The magpie labyrinth of Goldfarb’s garment shop with its thousands of hanging pieces cocooned in translucent plastic, empty women waiting to have life breathed into them. Klute delves into the chiaroscuro for which its genre is famous with a confidence other color films struggle to equal; its scenes of shadow and selective lighting play more like something out of a giallo than they do like anything one might see in other contemporary crime films of its moment. An eye sparkling like a precious stone in a beam of moonlight. Long limbs moving gracefully in the soft gloom, bodies intersecting, parting, merging. Not a single moment is less than immaculately constructed.