It was the way he looked at women, that I found so endearing. For many of Donald Sutherland’s romantic characters, when he observed women, he would bring out their innermost private self. He had a way of excavating the real you—the woman you keep to yourself. It was mesmerizing, intoxicating, dreamy, natural, vulnerable, terrifying, erotic. There’s a scene near the end in Klute, which takes place at a fruit-market, where this element of Sutherland’s is on display, and I have rewatched it many times since I heard he ed away yesterday at the age of 88. It is where Sutherland is encased in amber in the temple of my own cinephilia, and it’s how I want to him.

Prior to the scene, Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda, in a career-best performance) lays in bed with John Klute (Sutherland) after they’ve made love to one another. Bree is a part-time sex worker, and has a hard time feeling comfortable in her own skin, let alone, around other people, and she tells him that he shouldn’t get hung up on her. She protects herself from the complications of love by rejecting it, and acting like she’s above it, but she rests comfortably in his arms after sex. She finds that she seems made for the crook between his right shoulder and his hips. Easy to drift away, right then and there, in what that space of his body suggests. But she knows men. The film does too—dripping in paranoid shadows from DP Gordon Willis—which suggest that the wrong man could be waiting behind any corner. Shadows beckon the worst of these creatures, and she’s seen many of her friends hurt or killed on the rough streets of New York.

But John Klute is different. Maybe.

At the fruit-market, Klute notices Bree casually stuff an apple into her bag while he’s speaking with the vendor. She’s probably done this a million times. She’s rough around the edges. We learn this throughout the picture, and she softens, but, importantly, doesn’t change who she is for him. She has these vulnerable, tough aspects of herself, and Klute observes them without criticism, and she isn’t used to that feeling. His gaze is intimate without asking anything from her, and when he jokingly asks her what she has in her bag, it’s played like a secret between the two. He smiles at her, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She’s embarrassed, blushing, and dizzy with appreciation for the innocent little cat and mouse game they keep playing with one another. They’re communicating without saying more than what needs to be said. We’re given just as much information as they give one another.

Fonda is so dialed into her character that every gesture she makes feels organic, like it’s springing from some great reservoir of Bree inside of herself. The eye of the viewer is naturally pulled towards her, but Sutherland doesn’t become invisible in the shadow of Fonda’s once-in-a-lifetime performance. They play off of one another beautifully, and it is Klute’s acceptance of Bree—every part of her—which causes the film to experience a great transformation from a paranoid thriller to a romance. This ultimately boils down to how Sutherland looks at Fonda in this particular scene. Klute is attuned to every aspect of this wild young woman, and he wants to know more, but never crosses a boundary or pries for information she isn’t ready to share. Fonda is given a close-up to respond to being seen, and we see a full body effect of relief wash over Bree. This guy really is something. He might be home. But it’s just as terrifying for her to fall for someone in that way so she takes a step away from Klute, pulls herself back to reality, and shields herself again. Their romance is a work in progress, because it’s hard for her, and he knows this too. But the scene closes with her clinching the back of Klute’s jacket with one finger on the way up the street, charmed nonetheless, in what she’ll come to think of as a perfect moment.

I come back to this scene in my mind all the time, because it’s one of those magical instances of character interaction that has made me fall in love with acting. When I saw Klute I was immediately taken with Fonda’s performance, because the intended effect of the film is to personalize the visual grammar around the emotional and physical integrity of how Bree moves around her environment and reacts to it. It is a performance of profound internal dynamics, which manifest and evolve through her precise choices of activity and characterization. It’s right up there with Charles Laughton’s work in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Sheryl Lee’s in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me among my personal favorites. I tend to like characters who move around like a bird with a broken wing, and Sutherland’s choices are sturdy, and subtle, and act as a contrasting element, which enliven Fonda’s performance even further. It is without ego that he lifts her up, and acts as a base for her, but he finds avenues where he allows us to see who he is as well. He’s a boy-scout in a way, chivalrous, and all of that information is right there on the surface—and he is the antithesis of the complex, neurotic male characters of the era. Sutherland brings soulfulness and integrity to the role, and in a way, he is just as private as Bree, but his secrets do not stem from an outward, negative experience where life has wounded him. He’s certainly seen things that could damage a person, considering he’s a private detective, but we aren’t privy to these factors, because he is always moving forward and doing his job. I believe he thinks that his work balances the rough parts of the world out somehow, but he probably wouldn’t speak to that feeling. The mesmerizing banality of his decent nature is such a severe contrasting element to Bree’s fractured perspective of New York that the film lives and dies on his performance as much as it does Fonda’s. It is through the tone of his voice, the twinkle in his eye, and the space he gives Bree—even when they are in bed with one another—that paints a picture of who he is through Sutherland’s body language which the audience is aware of on an unconscious level.

Sutherland was in numerous films which hold a place near and dear to my heart (Don’t Look Now, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), or played a role in my history as a young cinephile (The Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Heroes), but Klute remains the one for me. It’s the one that showed me who I felt like in my 20s, and what I needed from someone else, and have since found. For me, it’s one of those movies you sometimes run into at an important time in your life that changes you, and gives you a better sense of yourself. I’ve been trying to think of the right words and the right way of phrasing everything that Sutherland meant to me as a cinephile, and what drew me to him in the decades that followed the 70s, but I think I want to leave things at the fruit-market, and with a smile from John Klute. From Donald Sutherland.

Originally posted on my patreon