The Debussy Film

Vladek Sheybal and Oliver Reed

Ken Russell's The Debussy Film is a black and white television film done for the BBC's Monitor program in 1965. Both Google and Wikipedia list this as a documentary, but I think this is nonsensical. The film starts as a straight ahead documentary using still photographs by Debussy's friend and agent provocateur Pierre Louys, but shifts into reflexively post-modern territory by focusing on a film crew recreating episodes from Debussy's life. Oliver Reed stars as a version of himself playing the French composer. Vladek Sheybal is Russell's stand-in, playing both the director and Louys in the film within the film. Annette Robertson has the lead female role as Gaby, the most put upon of Debussy's many girlfriends. She plays the masochistic female role that Glenda Jackson ended up playing in Russell's ouevre. The many depredations Debussy heaps upon Gaby resound ironically with the knowledge that Russell and Robertson were having a fling during the filming.

Russell had resorted to documentary work for the BBC after the failure of his first feature, French Dressing in 1964. However, he was too restless and rebellious to churn out staid documentary fare. He wanted to utilize actors to recreate the lives of artists with the flamboyance employed by avant-garde and balmier commercial directors. The Debussy Film marks the beginning of a period of promise for Russell before his better instincts gave way to hysteria. Not that there aren't examples of incipient hysteria and, worse, cutesiness in The Debussy Film. There is a nutty section combining footage of mock duels and bumper cars scored to the Ride of the Valkyries. The early days of Debussy and Gaby's romance is rendered in silent slapstick style to equally stupefying effect. You can't say that Russell wasn't consistent in his approach, 1975's Lisztomania has Roger Daltrey mimicking Charlie Chaplin for similarly mystifying reasons.

There are redeeming features to this one, though. Reed, in the first of many collaborations with Russell, is in fine form. Only Russell and David Cronenberg were able to mine Reed's more subtle side. In Reed's later and lesser work, he would often resort to slapdash bombast. Maybe he knew he could rein it in on a Russell set because the director would be bringing the bombast; see especially Reed's relative restraint amidst the madness of The Devils. Russell seems to regard Debussy as a musical genius and a lower class lout with a streak of sadism towards his female admirers and this conception of the role is certainly right in Reed's wheelhouse. He and Robertson have a nicely rancid rapport. Vladek Sheybal, another Russell regular, indulges in a spasmodic performance that points towards a career in which he played a lot of icy Iron Curtain villains.

Oliver Reed

The script for The Debussy Film is by Mervyn Bragg who would go on to concoct the screenplay for The Music Lovers, a much more conventional biopic that signaled the start of Russell's artistic decline. In The Debussy Film, Bragg and Russell chose to use a didactic method of telling Debussy's story that is influenced by documentary narration, but is not encumbered by a straightforward structure or high culture stuffiness. The constant use of voiceover narration points us to Debussy's influences without leading us by the nose. This approach yields many fine moments, particularly Reed's sensitive readings of Debussy's diary. A visual survey of the paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites and Whistler that influenced Debussy's artistic approach is a highlight, though it did make me wish that the BBC had given the Russell the funds to do this film in color. 

The films about composers and artists Russell made in the 1960s represent his high water mark before he lost all sense of restraint. I don't hate Russell's output, I prefer him to, for example, the equally "outrageous" Baz Luhrmann, but it is slim pickings in Russell's ouevre after Women in Love. It is as if in these films made before his brief commercial heyday, Russell could sublimate his titanic ego in the service of honoring the artistic greats. I remember baiting my high school music teacher, the grandiloquent and gentlemanly John Merrill, about his opinion towards Russell in the 1970s. I knew that a man who described, somewhat facetiously, rock music as blasphemy probably didn't grok the director's work. This was true, but he surprised me by admitting that he very much liked Russell's film about Delius, Song of Summer, released on television in 1968. This happened, I would one day discover, to be Russell's favorite amongst all his films. I hope to track it down one day, but Mr. Merrill's opinion greatly impressed upon the young Biff the importance of keeping an open mind, even when regarding an auteur as disreputable as Ken Russell.