Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For: Petulia - 1968

PETULIA 1968lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2012/08/petulia-1968.html

Some years back, director Francis Ford Coppola released The Godfather Trilogy 1901-1980: a chronologicallyreassembled edit of all three of his Godfather films. As appealing as it was (in a passive, brain-dead, sort of way) tohave the sprawling Corleone saga laid out in a fashion so as to make it impossible for even the most distractedviewer to lose the narrative thread, the sad result was that in the attainment of unequivocal comprehension, allpoetry was lost. Robbed of the sometimes poignant juxtapositioning of past and present events, The Godfatherbecame just another gangster film.

The artful manipulation of time in The Godfather films—the past coexisting with the present—is more than just astylistic conceit; it's an essential representation of the films' narrative themes of destiny and predetermination. InPetulia, the conveyance of time as a nonlinear phenomenon reflective of the characters' fractured lives (a point ofannoyance for several critics back in 1968), is no less fundamental to the telling of this distinctly Sixties, yettimeless, story.

Down on MeWell-heeled attendees of a charity fundraising dance "Shake for Highway Safety"

react to the rock group Big Brother & the Holding Company (Janis Joplin)

Richard Lester’s Petulia is the story of a small group of very pretty people whose perfect-looking lives arenevertheless bloody battlefields strewn with the carnage of emotional (sometimes physical) violence every bit as

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senseless and arbitrary as the glaring images of the Vietnam War that flicker from the largely ignored TV setsrunning nonstop in every room. Depicted in an artfully disjointed style which intercuts flash-forwards and flashbackswith scenes occurring in the here and now, Petulia examines the tentative love affair between impulsive, unhappilymarried newlywed Petulia (Christie) and the generationally displaced surgeon Archie (Scott). Archie is an old-fashionedly decent man facing a kind of existential mid-life crisis in the midst of "The Pepsi Generation," and hedoesn't know quite what to make of it all.Just as Coppola's use of flashbacks in The Godfather created a sense of history encroaching upon thepresent, Petulia is an almost-love-story told in a time-tripping, hopscotch fashion so organic to the era (the swingingSixties); the place (Summer of Love San Francisco); and characters (the beautiful people), that it’s impossible toimagine the film realized in any other way.

Julie Christie as Petulia Danner

George C. Scott as Archie Bollen

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Richard Chamberlain as David Danner

Shirley Knight as Polo (Prudence) Bollen

Joseph Cotten as Mr. Danner

I saw Petulia for the first time just two months ago, and given my predilection for all things Julie Christie, it struck meas more than a little puzzling how this near-perfect little gem had managed to elude me all these years. I suspectedI would like it, but I didn't really expect to love it as much as I did. Funny, touching, and full of startlingperformances...it's so perfectly attuned to my tastes and interests it practically has my name on it. Advertised at thetime of its release as “The uncommon movie,” Petulia might well have added "unexpected” to the mix, for I've reallynever seen anything quite like it. Not only does it have Julie Christie at her most jaw-droppingly gorgeous (EVER…and that’s saying something), but she, George C. Scott, and Richard Chamberlain bring an empathetic intensity to

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characters one might best describe as guardedly dispassionate.

Although they share no scenes together, Petulia reunites Kathleen Widdoes(pictured) with her The Group co-star, Shirley Knight

Petulia is Richard Lester's savage picture postcard satire of American life in the late Sixties. A time whensentimentality was considered square, relationships tangential, and the polished-metal, automated world of “now”was moving and changing so fast it stood in constant danger of leaving itself behind. As a dissection of an emergingcultural scene and its people, Petulia is a surprisingly focused social skewering considering its relative lack ofdistance (it's one of the few mainstream films commenting on the decade to actually have been filmed where andwhen what we commonly associate with '60s culture originated). Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night, The Ritz)takes a fragmented, psychedelic view of the gleaming-surfaced existence of jaded, wealthy hippies anddisillusioned, drop-out professionals. A world where the disenfranchised poor and people of color are alwaysglimpsed (just barely) on the periphery, and the hippies are just as phony and callous as the straights. The darklycomic, fumbling interplay of these lost-and-found souls striving—often in shell-shocked bemusement—to reach outto one another in a disposable, mechanized, instant gratification society is rendered in strobe-light glimpses boldlycaptured by Nicolas Roeg’s (The Man Who Fell To Earth, Don’t Look Now) kaleidoscopic camera lens.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILMPetulia (based on the John Haase novel, Me and the Arch Kook Petulia) is very effective, not to mentionoutrageously stylish, in the ways it depicts the messy complexity of relationships. Contrary to what songs, romancenovels, and fairy tales would have us believe, really connecting with another human being is a frustratingly difficultbusiness. It's imperfect, inconsistent, and comprised of a million little disappointments and uncertainties, all tetheredto an overpowering but seldom acknowledged need for human contact.

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The straightforward Archie can’t make head-nor-tails ofthe captivating but confounding Petulia, who is herselfof two minds about her beautiful but abusive husband,David. Polo, Archie’s ex-wife, is not quite over him, yetseems to have leapt into a compromise relationship.Meanwhile, their friends Barney and Wilma (?!) -ArthurHill and Kathleen Widdoes - whose own marriage isfalling apart, scheme to have them reconcile. Theseemotionally inarticulate couplings form a roundelay ofmissed chances and miscommunications endlesslyreenacted by the uniformly dissatisfied protagonists.Individuals whose words and actions seem to be foreverat cross purposes with their desires.

As Petulia is as much a social satire as a poignantlybleak meditation on emotional authenticity (“Real,honest-to-God tears, Petulia?”), the picture of Americathat Lester paints is one of alienating mechanizationand deceptive appearances. Richard Lester’s SanFrancisco is one of automatized motels; switch-onfireplaces; indoor flowers that die when exposed to realsunlight; decoy hospital room TV sets; sullen flowerchildren; nuns driving Porches; topless restaurants;gloomy all-night supermarkets; and kiddie excursions to Alcatraz Prison (which is a reality now, but was not, if Iremember correctly, the case back in 1967).

Among the row houses of Daly City, Archie seeks the assistance of two twonon-cooperative hippies (that's WKRP's Howard Hessman in the pink shirt)

PERFORMANCESNo one does sham superficiality better than Julie Christie. From Darling's narcissistic Diana Scott, Far From theMadding Crowd's perniciously thoughtless Bathsheba, to the emotionally vacant Linda Montag of Fahrenheit 451,Christie has made a career of adding depth and dimension to otherwise unsympathetically shallow characters.The walking contradiction that is Petulia Danner: arch posturing one moment, self-recriminating anguish the next, isone of Julie Christie's strongest most persuasive performances.

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I can't say I've ever cared much for George C. Scott (who somehow grows increasingly more handsome as the filmprogresses) but I think he is rather spectacular here. He avoids the usual self-pity that comes with these kinds ofroles and makes Archie into a strong, very likable character you come to care a great deal about. It's a mosteffective dramatic device when a staunchly unexcitable character in a movie breaks into a smile, and when thishappens in Petulia, it just about breaks my heart.

Special mention must also be made of Richard Chamberlain (then known exclusively for TV's Dr. Kildare and as aheartthrob romantic lead) daringly cast against type and delivering an overwhelmingly chilling portrayal of a manwho is a physically perfect, psychologically damaged, Ken doll.

THE STUFF OF FANTASYA film set in '60s San Francisco is bound to be visually vivid, and Petulia is a marvelous-looking movie whose colorphotography is as expressive as it is overwhelming. There are psychedelic light shows accompanying musicalappearances by The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, striking vistas of Bay Area locations, and the candy-coloredmod fashions of the day take on a fairly 3D effect.

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My partner was the first to take note of the beige/brown cheerlessness of Archie's bachelor apartment (top)contrasting so expressively with Petulia's fraudulently festive pink and yellow boudoir (below).

THE STUFF OF DREAMSIt's always struck me as a curious phenomenon how so many films from the '80s and '90s can appear so dated tome, yet most of my favorite films from the late -'60s and '70s seem to have a timelessness about them. I don'tpretend to know the reason, but I suspect it's because so many '60s and '70s films are about people andrelationships, while '80s and '90s films are chiefly the result of pitches, formulas, and focus groups. Ignore theswinging '60s window dressing (but who would want to?) and Petulia is as topically relevant today as it was in 1968.Perhaps more so

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Estrangement. The natural consequence of erecting barriers in the avoidance ofpain

On the strength of one month's ownership of the DVD and three viewings, Petulia has become my absolute favoriteRichard Lester film. The first American feature from a director known for his bold comedic style, Petulia is not asgreat a thematic departure as it at first appears. There are plentiful examples of Lester's penchant for absurdisthumor, caustic irony, and the sad/funny details of human interaction. But what distinguishes Petulia for me is thehumanity at the core of this little microscopic vision of the world. That and the sophisticated style of its execution. Inthat, Petulia is indeed an uncommon movie.

Petulia is, at its heart, an adult twist on the classic fairy tale. Petulia is the damselin distress who, perhaps tragically, can't or doesn't want to be saved. David, the

Prince Charming whose beauty conceals a beast. Archie, the frog prince wholives happily ever after.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

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