{"id":36972,"date":"2025-09-01T17:54:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T17:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/36972\/"},"modified":"2025-09-01T17:54:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T17:54:12","slug":"kim-novaks-vertigo-review-an-overly-fawning-tribute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/36972\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Kim Novak’s Vertigo’ Review: An Overly Fawning Tribute"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tShown out of competition in Venice<\/a> in conjunction with the festival giving a lifetime achievement award to its 92-years-young titular subject, documentary Kim Novak<\/a>\u2019s Vertigo is essentially a cinematic fan letter, written with love but chock full of gushing, purple prose, some of it by the subject herself. <\/p>\n

\n\tSwiss filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe is already known for his essayistic celebrations of auteurs and their masterworks, including Lynch\/Oz<\/a>, Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist <\/a>and The People Vs. George Lucas. He may take writing, directing and co-producing credits here, and appears onscreen as Novak\u2019s interviewer, but it\u2019s Novak who feels like the one who\u2019s largely in charge.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tKim Novak’s Vertigo\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tHer-story.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue:<\/strong> Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)
Director\/screenwriter:<\/strong> Alexandre O. Philippe
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 16 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThat commitment to seeing the world through Novak\u2019s eyes comes with a certain price in credibility. However much you might admire her as an actor, especially for her most famous and justly celebrated performance in Vertigo (1958), it\u2019s hard not to feel a little skeptical of her own and the film\u2019s insistence that, \u201cat the peak of her fame,\u201d she \u201cturned her back on the spotlight to embrace a life of solitude, self-expression and authenticity,\u201d in the words of the film\u2019s press notes. Okay, queen. <\/p>\n

\n\tThere are only the merest, teensiest hints that other factors might have been at play, such as the institutional misogyny that values female stars most when they\u2019re at the peak of their beauty. Certainly, there is not the faintest whiff of a waft of a suggestion that Novak was anything other than delightful to work with, the very incarnation of sweetness and light herself.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the end, some viewers may find themselves inexplicably turning on the subject even if Philippe, editor David Lawrence and the team build a strong case for the greatness of her talent through judiciously chosen archive clips from some of her best films, in addition to Vertigo. She speaks very persuasively about herself as a \u201creactor\u201d as much as an actor, a partner capable of bringing just as much emotion to a scene even if she barely spoke. That, of course, is luminously visible in the bits we see from Vertigo opposite James Stewart, especially in scenes where her character Judy is also giving a performance of her own as Madeleine, a woman supposedly possessed by the spirit of her ancestor Carlotta. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut snatches of other Novak performances build the case for her range, especially those from star turns like Bell Book and Candle (1958) and Jeanne Eagels (1957); her two films supporting Frank Sinatra Pal Joey (1957) and The Man With the Golden Arm (1955); and the underrated 60s work such as Of Human Bondage (1964) \u00a0and The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968). How odd that this treats such interesting late career works like Just a Gigolo (1978), The Mirror Crack\u2019d (1980) and Liebestraum (1991) as if they never existed.<\/p>\n

\n\tKim Novak\u2019s Vertigo is just as capriciously selective when it comes to covering Novak\u2019s biography, leaving huge gaps in the story, like her marriages and family life, in favor of much celebration of the houses she\u2019s lived in and the pets she\u2019s owned. I, for one, would have been very happy with a lot more discussion of her adorable pet goat, but perhaps the film errs a bit too much when dwelling at length on Novak\u2019s childhood and parents. Her appreciation of Greta Garbo is more illuminating, although may not fully justify quite how much screen time clips from Queen Christina take up here. <\/p>\n

\n\tLikewise, the sequence wherein Novak unboxes her grey suit from Vertigo, the one designed by incomparable costume designer Edith Head, might have benefited from a few sly edits, perhaps making way for more discussion about the outfit\u2019s significance in the film and not just its function as a fetish for the star herself. But others may find Novak\u2019s eccentric rhapsodizing utterly charming, and there\u2019s no denying the woman is a force of nature, like her own paintings, swirling with secrets, pastel and lurid all at once.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shown out of competition in Venice in conjunction with the festival giving a lifetime achievement award to its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[18,117,19,17,28688,327,12876,21427,11492,21428],"class_list":{"0":"post-36972","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-kim-novak","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-venice","15":"tag-venice-2025","16":"tag-venice-film-festival","17":"tag-venice-film-festival-2025"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}