Because a producer is eager to resurrect his career, he attempts to lure a beautiful actress out out seclusion to help him in his new project. Does she agree with his proposal?
The deliberate and sometimes dismaying anachronisms are signs of a deep, unshakable commitment to a personal aesthetic -- a commitment that is sometimes more moving than anything in the film itself.
Defiantly and proudly old-fashioned both in style and content, weaving an (intentionally) campy melodrama about the mysterious suicide of a faded movie queen into a spellbinding meditation on cinema and the price of manufactured illusions.
There's a lot of awkwardness to Fedora, from a sluggish pace to an awful bit of last-minute overdubbing that mars two performances, but there's a lot of fascination in it.
The offhand jabs at the dissolution of orthodox craftsmanship in 1970s cinema are overwhelmed by a deeper core of autocritique played out in the film's downward trajectory.
Trust Wilder to know what he's doing, even during the deliberate clichés. See it like that, and I bet you'll like it. See it with a straight face, and you'll think it's boring and obvious.
This wearying nostalgia for golden-age moviemaking aside, Fedora exposes, through a major plot twist I won't give away, the off-screen pathologies that constitute the nightmares of the dream factory.
