User Reviews

When Ken Russell was working on his series of short films about composers for the BBC, including Elgar, Delibes, and this one about Debussy, it was hard to see that his style would evolve into the excesses of Tommy and The Lair of the White Worm. Still, his early work is well worth seeing and is echoed in some of his later work such as Savage Messiah and to some extent, Valentino and The Music Lovers.

In this Monitor episode, Russell regular Oliver Reed plays the composer in a series of voice overs, as well as a more modern reflection.Vladek Sheybal plays the slightly cynical narrator as well as a character in Debussy's life, Pierre Louis, who likes to do unmentionable things with young girls. Love interest Gaby is the elfin Annette Robertson, looking almost too modern and knowing for the time.

This is clearly a 60s film, looking back as well as forward. The effect is rather mixed, but magical, and it is beautifully filmed and developed. The kind of thing the BBC just aren't interested in anymore - The Debussy Film, Monitor, or Ken Russell just wouldn't get their foot in the door on TV today.

I have just seen Ken Russell's "The Debussy Film" at the National Film Theatre in London.It's every bit as good as I dimly remember it on TV in 1965.Sequences which stuck in the mind came up like old friends.An excellent example of the film within a film;to me it echoes Godard's "Le Mepris" made in 1962.It was shown as part of the celebrations of the director's 80th birthday.Celebrations in which the BBC seems to be taking no interest.A 1000 pities that they can't find time in their TV schedules to show some of these classics...too busy showing more cookery or gardening programmes?Or could it be that Russell's TV films shame the current drivel being spewed out by the Corporation?

Ken Russell was an interesting if controversial director. There is a clear love and interest for the subject and the music if a biopic of a composer or whatnot but he was prone to excesses that some will deem unnecessary or distasteful. The Debussy Film is fascinating if not quite as good or subtle as Elgar. It is filmed absolutely beautifully, I could see there was a big Fellini influence in how it looked. The music is glorious also and lovingly used, Debussy's music has grown on me significantly overtime, mainly due to his songs and watching The Debussy Film actually made me appreciate it even more. The biographical elements are very interesting, with a mix of things I knew and new information, while the voice overs are intelligently written with nothing that leaps out as out of place. It is splendidly directed by Russell, you can see a lot of his style with a mixture of restraint and excess(but never questionable) but there is never too much of one over the other. Oliver Reed is fabulous as Debussy, ideally suited and he gives his all into the role. In conclusion, wonderful and recommended highly. 9/10 Bethany Cox

One can only imagine the switchboard at Monitor in the mid 60s after a showing of The Debussy Film, a BBC documentary on the impressionist composer. Viewers settling in for a respectable rendering of the man who composed Clair de Lune get both barrels however of a genius artist and his music to go along with a tawdry personal life of adultery, betrayal, suicide.

The Debussy Film is one of director Ken Russell's earlier bio works that gives clear indication of the outrageous signature style that would inform his film career and the controversial biographies of Tchaikovsky (The Music Lovers) Liszt and Mahler. His taste often questioned, he's never been accused of being dull. Applying Debussy's romantically charged and dissonant music to his sometimes jarring and powerful compositions he both celebrates the artist and deconstructs the man who used and drove lovers over the edge and betrayed benefactors.

A collaborator with Debussy once stated that the only thing Debussy ever loved was himself and possibly his music. If that's the case then the outrageous Mr. Russell has once again come closer to the truth than more sober chroniclers.

T he film based on the Fowles' novel "The French Lieutentant's Woman" had to face Foweles device of adopting the convention of the Victorian novel with the narrator who stands above all his characters and presents us with a "realistic interpretation" and a post modern sensibility in which we don't always know what is the true story or what occurs in the minds of the characters. And so Fowles presents us with alternative endings.

How to translate that into film. Here the director borrowed Russell's device of having scenes in which Oliver Reed "plays" Debussy and scenes in which he interacts, as a actor Oliver Reed, with "The Director" and discusses how to play Debussy. This is exactly the device used to portray the fate of Charles and Sarah - in part of the film we see them as characters playing out their lives in Lyme Regus, but at other times we see them as an actor and an actress who must become involved in roles within a film yet at the same them are beginning to become involved in a love affair.

So I would say that a debt is owed to Russell in creating this approach to ambiguity and multiple readings in a film.