“Kim NovakS Vertigo“Has one of the more heartwarming and, sincere, historically important, codes to a film -focused documentary in the latest memory. It is such a special moment that it mostly motivates how film been mounted before it.
Until then it is a rather uneven and unstructured film portrait and one of the weaker efforts from its Director Alexandre O. Philippe. The Swiss -born Cinephilen has become a kind of cross between Laurent Bouzereau and Mark Cousins with its consequence of documentaries about iconic films and film subjects.
Novak is really a dignified topic for a documentary. She is not only the last survivor of the film that many consider to be the largest ever made, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, but she is the obsession Nexus in a movie about obsession that has inspired so much obsession During the 67 years since it was released itself. At 92, her star power is as great and magnificent as ever. But more than ordering your look as a big star does, and as Hitchcock really did in the ultimate movie about “The Gaze”, Novak also keeps your attention as a unique thought -provoking artist in his own right.
Philippe takes us on a journey through his career. Born Marilyn Novak and assigned the name Kim by the tyrannical Columbia pictures head Harry Cohn, Novak was in a constant state of voltage in Hollywood. She brushed against what she calls “exaggerated” actors of the 50’s movie stars and appreciated naturalistic “reacts” instead. And she wanted more meatier, more material roles as the industry simply would not give her at that time: after working as a model, Novak, to the forces that were, glamor above all, and the moguls had no benefit to other types of meaning she could create and represent. They wanted to focus on her surface appeal, on her mystery. That she was a source of desire rather than a subjective force in her own right.
If anything, Novak himself dedicated depth and dimension that the costumes did not want or asked for her desire to make her the industry’s foremost cash star-as she really became in the late 50’s. The number of fantastic movies to her name is undoubtedly limited: Joshua Logans “Picnick”, Otto Preminger’s “The Man With The Golden Arm”, Richard Quines “Bell, Book and Candle,” and of course “Vertigo.”
“Kim Novak’s Vertigo” shows some of the misogynistic indignities she had to endure on the screen, with clips from “Pal Joey” and “Kiss me, stupid” which probably adds Novak’s ultimate desire to leave Hollywood completely, which she had mostly done in the end of the 60s. The documentary is most interesting when it is not delayed on clips from her films, but when it focuses on her in the present at home in Oregon. Novak is an avid painter for decades and is seen at her easel and puts a brush on canvas and creates paintings of extraordinary swirling, whirlpool -like complexity. You definitely think about the spiral motif in “Vertigo.” And in several works, she immediately created her own version of “Vertigo” art and recreated pictures of her Madeleine and Judy from the film.
“Vertigo” has clearly haunted her how it has generations of movie lovers. Apart from its reputation and its inherent artistic greatness on many levels, it is once in any movie that Novak could interrogate what frustrated her so much about her Hollywood career: that the industry could not look beyond the surface of her. And so she talks a long way about how the characters in Madeleine and Judy talk to her deeply and remain with her and some of her. She talks about “Vertigo” as if both an insider and outsider – yes, she is in the movie and the heart itself, but perhaps because of Hitchcock’s way of moving actors around as chess pieces, as the object of him to control how she talks about it is still something removed, as it was another person who is a chess bite, which she is what is the case for him chess bits, as the subject of him to check, how she talks about it is still slightly removed, as it was another person who was on the screen and her at the same time.
This means that when she talks about “vertigo”, it is not so different from what any diehard obsessed with it would have to say, even if her experience is basically singular. It puts the gap between what is on the screen and what is real, quite strong. Between the surface and what is below. Between Kim Novak the movie star and Kim Novak the person.
She is articulated and is looking for all the time, the movie even opens with stories that you might think had come from John Mekas More than from Novak – of course at the height of her fame, she was not expressed like this. “I hesitate to even record this because I don’t know what comes out of what I say, what I mean,” she began. “What do I mean? Is that what it is about: What do I mean? What do I think? What do I feel? I do not know what is expected of me to feel, or to think, or even be, for that matter.”
In all respects, what is most interesting comes with “Kim Novak’s Vertigo” from Novak himself. Philippe’s filmmaking seems especially rudimentary here, much more than in his William Shatner Portrait “You can call me Bill.” It is powerful and convincing that Novak can occupy the role of fan of “Vertigo” as she does – less interesting is Philippe’s own fan Gushing. He has abandoned the close text analysis of his second Hitchcock study, “78/52,” As exactly dissected how the “Psycho” shower scene achieves its effect, in favor of choosing not to give much perspective here at all. He just wants to rejoice in the feeling of “scam”, the feeling of feeling Kim Novak, this time – not investigating what is the root of these feelings.
As a movie, “Kim Novak’s Vertigo” is a disappointment. It feels like a beautiful portrait without a frame. A worthy companion to her receiving Golden Lion for Lifetime of 2025 Venice Film festival, but not much of a cinematic performance in its own right.
And yet, just as “Kim Novak’s Vertigo” seems to occupy that space for 2024’s documentary “Merchant/Ivory” – Another doctor made by a fan without much to say other than gush – it has a code of shaking consequence. Novak goes through its possessions, gathers over decades and in boxes for all that time and comes across what may be the most iconic costume drain in film history. The gray suit that Madeleine had struggled and which Judy carries at the end of “Vertigo” at the moment she revealed to have been Madeleine all the time. It has put in a box in Novak’s possession for 67 years.
She pulls it out, and it is still soft and completely nasty as if it were 1958 again. She sniffs it to make it so much more to some of herself. And cries in gratitude to see it again and be with it again. Suddenly, film history is so much alive at that moment. Immediate and eternal at once. Just like “Vertigo.”
Rating: B-
“Kim Novak’s Vertigo” premiered at 2025 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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