In Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Faye Dunaway plays a neurotic, spaced-out, emotionally unstable model by the name of Lou Andreas Sand living in a remote beach house, trying to recover from a nervous breakdown that saw her institutionalized.
The script for the film was inspired by the life of iconic 1950s fashion model Anne Saint Marie. Director Jerry Schatzberg (Panic in Needle Park) taped hours worth of interviews with Saint Marie—who suffered a nervous breakdown at the height of her career—and these sessions became the basis of the film. Actor Barry Primus plays a photographer who is interviewing Dunaway’s character. The conceit of the interview gives the almost cinéma vérité-ish film a non-narrative structure that allows for an effective use of the jarring flashback and flash-forward editing style popular at the time, and contributes viscerally to explaining how truly disconnected from reality Lou has become.
The film provides quite a good showcase for Dunaway as an actress, it’s raw at times. She’s stunning in it, too. What a great beauty she was then. Puzzle of a Downfall Child is also beautifully shot. First-time director Schatzberg was a noted photographer—he snapped Dylan for the Blonde on Blonde album cover and the Rolling Stones in drag—who worked for Vogue and other major magazines. It was when he shot Dunaway for Esquire that he pitched her the idea. The two became lovers and Schatzberg’s wife of 18 years divorced him, although Dunaway would leave him in 1969 for Marcello Mastroianni.
Sadly Puzzle of a Downfall Child has never come out on home video and so is not widely known. It was restored by Universal in 2011 and shown at the 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival with Faye Dunaway and Jerry Schatzberg in attendance, but it’s still unavailable (except in France)
Lucky for you, if you’ve read this far, some kind soul has posted Puzzle of a Downfall Child, in its entirety and in great quality, on YouTube:
