La Femme Publique (1984)

An unexperienced young actress is invited to play a role in a film based on Dostoyevsky's 'The Possessed'. The film director, a Czech immigrant in Paris, takes over her life, and in a short time she is unable to draw the line between acting and reality. She winds up playing a real-life role posing as the dead wife of another Czech immigrant, who is manipulated by the filmmaker into commiting a political assasination.

Looking strictly at the surface, La Femme Publique could rightly be called a movie about making movies. Among that genre, we most readily call up 8 ½, and Altman’s The Player, two films which, at their core, are their directors’ respective self-salutes to the auteur. The auteur in Zulawski is sufficiently evident in his sixth film, but he distances himself in lieu of a more subjective dissection of what he calls, “destiny.” Here the filmmaking process is secondary, serving both as subplot, and organically as the alter-environment through which fates are played out. […] (Review from Alan Jones)