“Portrait/fashion photographer Jerry Schatzberg made his directorial debut with this probing account of the professional/personal life of a high fashion model, played by Faye Dunaway.
“A wildly ambitious film, Puzzle of a Downfall Child self-consciously not only incorporates elements of the European art film, reflecting the work of such directors as Resnais, Fellini and Bergman; it also acknowledges the American cinema, with reference to von Sternberg/Dietrich, and in its complex structure, which is an hommage to Welles's Citizen Kane.
“The film was ignored by the public and critics at the time of its release (few American commercial films have ever dared to be so ‘difficult') but, in hindsight, reveals itself as one of the first films of the American cinema of the Seventies to explore the issue of a woman seeking self-definition in the modern world. A powerful film that contains one of Dunaway's most brilliant performances.” --Richard Lippe