Petulia

So many films tell stories about free spirits crushed by the mundane realities of the modern world, it must be because this is how screenwriters and directors view themselves. The destruction of anything rare and beautiful is, of course, one of the eternal themes in all of the arts, but movies in particular have always lionized Outsider status. Perhaps it's because film, a visual art form based around color, angle and movement, allows for striking metaphorical imagery of alienation. Even the loathed Garden State knows enough about film narrative to play into the concept - the professionally sedated Zach Braff blends into the wallpaper, literally disappearing into his surroundings.

In the 1960's in particular, for obvious socio-political reasons, you got a lot of films waxing nostalgic about the ultimate Non-Conformists bucking "The System" in some kind of deeply-meaningful, even existential, principled stand. It's the idea behind much of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, of course, and Easy Rider and many many many other films. (Even The Trip!)

Richard Lester's 1968 masterpiece Petulia takes the notion a few steps farther. Initially a lightly-entertaining screwball riff about an uptight recent divorcee (George C. Scott) and a kooky young married woman (Julie Christie) who bond over some half-seen, grim circumstances, the movie eventually descends into a cold, vaguely sinister allegory about artificiality and emotional distance. What begins by celebrating the eccentric Outsider archetype becomes a critique on the very notion of a counter-culture. In a world so far gone, so removed from reality and insulated from experience, Lester can't find room for true freedom. It has been innovated out of existence.



There's just a ton going on in this film. I've watched it twice now in one evening (if only to get the taste of Nacho Libre from out my head) and have been attempting to digest it for the past few hours. Lester's compelling, almost unsettling ideas about modernity and the loss of interconnectedness that goes along with it come at a heady clip. In a move reminiscent in some ways of Robert Altman, Lester fills his sonic canvas with background noise and barely-heard conversations.

Often, side discussions between extras will intrude upon the main action, and generally they reflect negatively on the speaker, including barely-masked hostility, bloodlust, schadenfreude and old-fashioned racist bigotry. These small touches within larger scenes create a general sense of mounting aggression; boredom, anger and violence underline every human interaction in this world. (In one sequence, a father tells his sons about prisoners excaping Alcatraz, a story they have already heard before, and Lester cuts immediately to another father telling his sons the same story. It's just a rote speech, given by every parent to every child taking that ferry, told so many times it has lost all actual meaning.)

Lester dices up the story and mixes up the order. By keeping major events clearly defined (including a car accident, the dropping off and returning of a tuba and a violent beating), he keeps the film from getting too confusing while slyly taking advantage of the achronological storytelling. Rather than using the narrative jumps to enhance the suspense or build up a sense of mystery, Lester simply rearranges events according to tone. As the film opens, we get a general sense pretty quickly about what has actually happened with all the main characters. It's just that we first see the relatively happy or benign parts of the story, before peeling back alyers to reveal the lies and betrayals and accidents behind all those initial actions. We begin to discover that these people we've been following and relating to are, in fact, a bunch of frauds incapable of living the lives they've pretended at for a while.

Stuffy physician Archie (Scott) meets the comely Petulia (Christie) at some kind of odd hotel party in San Francisco. The conservative suits hang out in one half of the room while the hippies and long-hairs groove on the other side to Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead (both of whom actually appear in the film). Though she's married, Petunia seduces Archie and convinces him to take her to a bizarre motel embedded in a parking garage, where everything is automated and there don't seem to be any flesh and blood employees.

This meeting, as it turns out, was not the beginning of Archie and Petulia's story, and we'll go back in time to witness how they really came to enter one another's lives as well as going forward to see what impact they will eventually have. Unfortunately, it turns out to be very little. At the end of the film, Petulia will tell Archie first that when she's dying and re-running her life in her head, she won't think of him at all. A moment later, she retracts her statement and issues a Hallmark card sentiment: "I'll never forget you." I think she was being more truthful the first time.

Petulia has decided that Archie needs her desperately and Archie has decided that this affair with a wacky but beautiful free spirit will provide the perfect segue into his newfound bachelorhood. Neither one is being honest with one another, but then again they are never honest with themselves, so perhaps this is too much to ask.

Lester pulls off this barely-controlled chaos with the aid of editor Antony Gibbs and particularly cinematographer Nicholas Roeg. In his own films, Roeg would use the same technique, telling stories out of order and even cutting between different times within the same scene. As in Don't Look Now (which also starred Christie), occasionally we gain insight into character's psychology by zipping back in time to witness their memories, but often Lester and Roeg are creating mini-montages, stringing together seemingly unrelated material in order to create unexpected or ambiguous revelations.

(Why cut, for example, to a prior car accident when Petulia and Archie first leavethe hotel? Is it to imply that Petulia is considering the circumstances that led to their getting together that night, or is it a dark glimpse of unfortunate events to come? And why skip an entire love scene, going right from the exhiliaration of a first kiss to the regret-fueled anxiety after one partner has already fallen asleep? Is Lester sarcastically implying that Archie is a bad lover? Or would Petulia, because of her background and currect emotional state, respond to any affection this way?)

I've barely scratched the surface and this review is already getting pretty long. I haven't talked about the repeated images of individuals touching one another and how Lester visually communicates the roadblocks that technology places between individuals attempting to share any kind of intimacy. (In one brilliant, brief shot, Archie and Petulia try to have a conversation from passing streetcars). I haven't discussed Joseph Cotton's small but tremendous role as Petulia's controlling father or Richard Chamberlain's stark, scary work as her husband David. And as you'd expect from a Lester film, each scene is filled with smart little asides and dashes of dark humor that really highlight all these ideas and more that I didn't get to describe. Like the indoor greenhouse Archie receives as a gift, with little light bulbs the installation man says work better than the sun. Oh, and I didn't talk about the borrowed shots from Vertigo, also filmed in San Francisco, and how Lester plays with a lot of Hitchcock's favorite themes in a sidelong, more cynical fashion.

Petulia i s just that kind of brilliant film, where you could go on talking about its brilliance for hours without ever running out of things to say. I've read a few reviews online declaring the film "dated," and I suppose this is accurate if you consider a dated film to be anything definitively "of its era." Petulia was definitely make in the late 60's, no doubt about it. One look at the outfits will reveal that much. But the concepts don't feel outdated. In fact, the notions of simulation and artificiality and how they relate to violence, both interpersonal violence and aggression between nations, comes up often in Lester's film and couldn't really have more topicality in 2006. The end of the human community not only means that we all exist in our own worlds, unable to truly comprehend where anyone else is coming from, but it also means that we lose a good deal of our compassion and ability to sympathize with others. It makes identifying and eliminating enemies that much easier.