Cinema: Predictable Embarrassment

Puzzle of a Downfall Child is the one about the agonies of a high-fashion model. Played as unregenerate soap opera—like Doctors’ Wives, for example (see following story)—it might have been diverting enough. But Director Jerry Schatzberg, Scenarist Adrien Joyce and Star Faye Dunaway are resolutely serious about every single moment, and the result is embarrassment. Miss Dunaway plays (quite badly) a manic fashion mannequin named Lou Andreas Sand, whose beauty and psyche crumble under the assorted and predictable pressures of the Big Time in New York. Even her language becomes stylized and stilted.

Miss Joyce (who also wrote Five Easy Pieces) has a good ear for regional nuances of speech but an unpleasant affinity for glib denouements. Schatzberg betrays his origins as a fashion photographer and commercial director in every fussy shot in the film. Each separate sequence has all the elaborate, artificial, deadening care lavished on it that Schatzberg might have employed on a true-to-life, 30-second TV spot for Gainesburgers.