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Simply Perfect

Fresh and Exciting

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Watching "Petulia" is fascinating not because it is a good film but because it represents such a convoluted period in our living history. The 1960s were beautiful and weird and depressing in equal measure; so is "Petulia."Dr. Archie Bollen (George C. Scott) is trying to make a graceful exit from a social benefit when he is accosted by the title character, played by Julie Christie. She tells Archie she's married and proposes they leave together then and there to have an affair. What follows includes a series of false starts, heartbreaks, and a dangerous beating, with Archie struggling between his feelings for Petulia and his sense she's not all there."All this 'I Love Lucy' jazz, it's only cute for a while," he tells her."I'm fighting for your life," she replies.Director Richard Lester made his mark directing the Beatles; their paths had diverged by 1968 but they seemed to be on the same wavelength. "Petulia" is a psychedelic send-up of middle-class values, playing in its nonsensical, random way the same head trips John Lennon employed in one of his hit songs from the same year, "I Am The Walrus." At the heart of the film is a line by one of Archie's friends: "Nobody has a life anymore."The message comes through; what "Petulia" needs is a bit more plot and characters you can care about. Neither Scott nor Christie were warm, engaging actors, and too often here they seem content at posing. Richard Chamberlain plays Petulia's husband, David, a dangerously unstable man who lives off his rich father and tries to affect a smoothness that doesn't carry into his dealings with Petulia. With David, you want to learn why he is the way he is and whether he has the will to overcome his dark side. But David is the only character with an inner life worth exploring.What I enjoy about "Petulia" are the visuals, shot by Nicolas Roeg who captures the panorama of San Francisco in its late 1960s glory. The colors are gorgeous, and you get these odd images lasting a few frames of such things as a dog eating bull guts, nuns speeding around a garage in a sports car, and a topless woman having lunch.This sort of eclectic vision seems suited for a movie that begins at the middle and then tells you the beginning and the end of the story simultaneously. There are also multiple flashbacks, flash-forwards, and even shots of things that happen only in the characters' heads.Sound like fun? It kind of is for a while, in that arresting 1960s way that recalls better films with similar frameworks like "Blow Up" and "if….", but the kookiness and the second-unit shots wind up swallowing too much of the thin narrative, to the point where Archie and Petulia's problems don't amount to a hill of beans even in their own mixed-up world."We didn't even give each other a cold," is how one of them leaves it with the other. It's a line that works just as well for the film as a whole.

Petulia opens with a shot of a middle-aged woman in a wheelchair, then cuts to a sixties' rock club featuring a very young-looking Janis Joplin. The sixties counterculture definitely torpedoed middle-aged women. Their husbands, like Archie, the middle-aged doctor played by George G. Scott, have the luxury of deciding they're "tired" of being married and jumping into affairs with younger women. This is a cause of continuing sadness to his ex-wife Polo, wonderfully played by Shirley Knight. Archie becomes involved with Petulia (Julie Christie), a clichéd "kooky" young woman of a type that often appeared in films of this period. Petulia is married to an abusive, wealthy husband, David, played with suitable evil by Richard Chamerlain. Christie is such a good actress that she gives some dimension to the role, although she's far outshone by Knight as Polo, the wounded wife. In its technique and attitude it really is a European or British film shot in San Francisco with American actors. There are interesting cultural references to the sixties, that may have seemed daring at the time, but now seem more innocent than anything else. The film is really about Archie and men of his generation and their bewilderment at the changing cultural mores represented by Petulia. On one hand they're delighted to feel that they can have sex with no responsibilities, but Petulia, for all her charm brings nothing but chaos into Archie's life. Was it really worth for him to be involved with her? And he ends up stuck with a high maintenance greenhouse in his apartment.

What, exactly, makes Petulia such a great movie?Is it the ravishing Julie Christie, who never seemed more appropriately out-of-place? The kismet-touched production, which was somehow at Haight-Ashbury at the right time? Maybe it's the editing, the fractured juxtaposition of images that both disorients and clarifies, making it more than the sum of its parts? The images by Nicholas Roeg, the fluent guidance of Richard Lester? What about the pitch-perfect supporting cast— Shirley Knight, Joseph Cotten, Richard Chamberlain (!), even Austin Pendleton, Howard Hesseman, and Rene Aberjonois (the last mysteriously uncredited on the IMDb)? Certainly, the haunting John Barry theme doesn't hurt. And the great George C. Scott, so far removed from the pyrotechnics of a General Turgidson or Patton, anchors it all with the kind of unshowy performance that most so-called great actors never get around to giving.It's all these, and more. Most of all, for me it's the profound and true sadness it evokes, its humor which does anything but lighten or elevate— the spiritual emptiness to which Petulia testifies. 40 years later, few movies have captured the spirit of contemporary life so well. It's terribly pertinent. And yet, Petulia is (like the character herself!) a paradox— so very much of its time, as well, that it seems caught between two worlds. Time is rarely this kind to a movie, but this one is anything but a relic, much less an exercise in nostalgia. Life is full of regret, both for things we've done, and things we've not done. The older I get, the more I love Petulia.

spoiler alert this movie is psychologically right on. petulia is in a bad marriage with bad in-laws, and archie is her way out. archie almost rescues her, but not quite. her indirectness and whimsy mask a good heart. "why didn't you come get me when you had the chance?" is the tragedy of the movie. she does rescue him: under her influence, he grows from angry, bitter, and alienated to lively and engaged - most vividly with his kids. but not present enough soon enough to take the stand of rescuing her and she stays in her compromise marriage.i'm not troubled by the flashbacks at all. they are straightforward, easy to follow, and mostly appear as memories would. much easier to follow than a soderberg movie like "the limey" - which i also liked - in which time is presented at the director's taste. in this movie we (mostly) see subjective time; the characters view the present and are triggered into the past.