Kluteby Anonymous

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September 04, 2005: Jane Fonda gives an absolutely brilliant performance for which she quite deservedly won a Best Actress Oscar. In this taut psychological thriller, Fonda plays Bree Daniel, a would-be actress-model who earns her living as a high-class call girl. The story concerns Klute (Donald Sutherland), a small-town policeman who comes to New York in search of a missing friend. He meets Fonda, and begins to fall in love with her. The murder mystery soon takes a back seat to one of the most affecting love stories of the '70s with one of the most memorable music scores provided by the underrated Michael Small. But it's Jane's picture all the way under the sure hand of director Alan J. Pakula. As Bree Daniel, Fonda is vulnerable, self-aware and articulate. Bree's knowledge that as a prostitute she has nowhere to go but down and her mixed-up efforts to escape, made her one of the strongest feminine characters to reach the screen in the '70s. As an actress, Fonda has a special kind of smartness that takes the form of speed she's always a little ahead of everybody, and this quicker beat--this quicker responsiveness--makes her more exciting to watch. This quality works to great advantage in her full scale, definitive portrait of Bree. As in many of her other dramatic roles, Fonda never stands outside her character, she gives herself over to the role, and yet she isn't LOST in it--she's fully in control, and her means are extraordinarily economical. She has somehow got to a plane of acting at which even the closest close-ups never reveals a false thought and, seen on the movie streets a block away, She's Bree, not Jane Fonda, walking toward us. It's hard to remember that this is the same actress who was the wide-eyed, bare-bottomed "Barbarella" or the anxious newlywed in "Barefoot in the Park". There wasn't another dramatic actress in American films at the time who could touch her. [filmfactsman]