By Lucy Stein
Play It as It Lays (1972)
In a new series, frieze invites artists to present a series of images that are important to them
Tuesday Weld in the film adaptation of Joan Didion’s novel Play It as It Lays (1970)
The writer Isabel Sobral Campos recommended this book to me at a rather timely moment and it changed my whole outlook. The 1972 film adaptation is less well known than the novel, perhaps because, even though Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne wrote the screenplay, it’s not very good! Anthony Perkins as BZ is wooden as anything, but Tuesday Weld as Maria Wyeth holds the whole thing together with a peculiar but powerful brand of deadness that lurks behind her bright-as-a-bunny-rabbit’s eyes. Didion’s novel taught me about the power of latent threat, that you don’t need to be overwrought and dramatic in order to be deeply unsettling, and Weld’s acting demonstrates this impeccably.
Having been institutionalized following a mental breakdown, the film sees Maria reflect on her life: her mother’s death (a possible suicide), her lost daughter Kate, and an unwanted abortion, all of which leads to a vast, flat ennui that matches her beloved desertscape of slinking rattlesnakes. She remembers the epic joyrides that she took under the midday sun in her convertible, subsisting on a diet of Coca-Cola and hard-boiled eggs that she would tap on the steering wheel to crack and unpeel.
The sixth part of Lucy Stein’s ‘Portfolio’ will be available tomorrow.