Apr. 18, 2003 - 7:49 pm
well, the diary is officially one year old now. i must be an adult. i have done something consistently for a solid year. does that qualify as settling down? so anyway, i didn't have anything interesting to do for the one year celebration, so i watched Klute since it was the last film in this batch that i had left to watch. some random female professor recommended this to me one evening at the media center.
it concerns a private detective who takes it upon himself to look into the past of one of his business/personal friends who went missing a year ago. the police never found out what happened to the man, so Donald Sutherland (whose character is named John Klute) goes to see Bree Daniels (played by Jane Fonda) who the missing man had written some letters to. they were indecent letters, and Bree is and was a call girl. Klute's stoicism seems to attract Bree in a way that she's never actually been attracted to a man before. she actually starts to feel something for this man who is protecting her from an unknown killer.
i think the packaging for this video leads you to some incorrect assumptions. the tagline is "Lots of guys swing with a call girl like Bree. One guy just wants to kill her." and then you have Bree and Klute on the cover. Klute has a gun in his hand. that's totally wrong. Klute never wants to or tries to kill Bree. he protects her. so that's just confusing and stupid.
i liked this movie quite a bit. the acting was amazing. especially Jane Fonda. she won her first Oscar for this movie. there are quite a few scenes that are shot in sort of interview style where she's just basically describing prostitiution, her feelings about that, and her feelings about her new relationship with Klute and how confusing that is for her to actually feel something for a man. she's supposed to be talking to a therapist, but it's done completely for the audience's appreciation of her character. it works excellently.
this movie also has a very well thought out ending. i won't give it away, but it's positive without being definitely positive. i was thinking the whole time that there was no way that she and Klute were going to continue to stay together after the murder mystery was solved. they're just too different and she's too committed to that style of life, no matter how much she cares for him. but you don't really get a completely clear answer at the end. it works out. i recommend watching this one if you don't mind thinking a lot about prostitution, perversion, and murder. there's excellent intrigue and romance too if you can get past that stuff.