Petulia (1968)

I’ve struggled with this film for years, and it’s not only because of Julie Christie’s lips, which have always struck me as being filled with embalming fluid. It has something to do with the world of “hip” vs. “square,” that a lot of American films shot in the nineteen-sixties sought to “examine,” but the real world of San Francisco hip the movie believes it’s delving into happens in the first three minutes–when Janis and the boys of the Holding Company do their thing. Exquisitely shot by Nicholas Roeg, the film was directed by Richard Lester, a British-based American who, obviously, knew how to make cinema, but is it cinema if there is no real tension between the status quo and the marginalized–the story Lester meant to tell? All of the characters are rich in problems and money; when, in the end, Christie’s emotionally frozen partner, beyond well played by Richard Chamberlin, indirectly kills a poor Mexican kid, we feel less than we’re supposed to feel because there’s been no set up: for the previous hundred minutes we’ve been in F. Scott Fitzgerald land, but without the troubling underpinnings that would make that death resonate. The characters drift through the beautiful San Francisco locale, sometimes in feathers, and there is talk, and there is talk, and, as in much of American cinema of the nineteen-sixties, there is a great deal of hair doing some thinking, too, but the guts have been removed at the expense of certain performers who live their guts in their eyes, including a young Kathleen Widdoes, Austin Pendelton, Shirley Knight, and the late Barbara Colby, completely brilliant in a very small roll. It has taken me years to understand and love George C. Scott’s nose, but I suppose an essential problem with the film is that Christie, coming off her Oscar win for playing a conniving kook, was too pre-determined a choice to give much freshness to the title role. She loves the language, but her heart’s not in it because she can’t find the film’s heart, and so our hearts can’t be in or near her, either.