Part of Weekend Classics
An ex-model and B-movie actress (Tuesday Weld) undergoes a psychic breakdown and recalls the traumatic events which led to her stay at a sanitarium. Depressed and frustrated with her loveless marriage to an ambitious film director, she numbs herself with drugs and sex with strangers. Only her friendship with movie producer B.Z. (Anthony Perkins) offers a semblance of solace. But even that relationship proves to be fleeting amidst the empty decadence of Hollywood. Based on the 1970 novel of the same name by Joan Didion and directed by Frank Perry. New 4K DCP Restoration
“If you were to imagine a celluloid ancestor to MULHOLLAND DRIVE’s Diane Selwyn, she’d probably look a lot like Maria Wyeth, the heroine of Frank Perry’s acerbic PLAY IT AS IT LAYS, based on Joan Didion’s merciless second novel. Brilliantly played by Tuesday Weld, Maria is rapidly unraveling, as is her marriage to her director husband... Didion’s book is extremely fragmented, [with] the point of view shifting abruptly between the third and first person. Perry’s film expertly translates this disjointed sense of time.” —Melissa Anderson, Film Comment “What makes the movie work so well on this difficult ground is, happily, easy to say: It has been well-written and directed, and Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins are perfectly cast as Maria and her friend B.Z. The material is so thin (and has to be) that the actors have to bring the human texture along with them. They do, and they make us care about characters who have given up caring for themselves." —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times “A portrait of modern ennui that hasn’t really lost any of its bite in the intervening 53 years…. It’s an essential picture.” —Bilge Ebiri, Vulture
