Petulia (1968)

Too much of everything

Such a frustrating disappointment

Just perfect...

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

An unhappily married socialite (Julie Christie) finds solace in the company of a recently divorced doctor (George C. Scott).The cast is top notch. Christie is excellent and Scott never fails. And director Richard Lester has made some enjoyable movies. But none of these three is showing their best work here. It is middling, average... and wholly forgettable.I feel like maybe it had a bit more weight at the time, because there is the angle of the father who now has to compete for the attention of his children with their "uncle" (mother's boyfriend). That is pretty routine these days, but may have been more novel in the 1960s.

Newlywed San Francisco socialite Petulia Danner (Julie Christie) is bored with her husband naval engineer David (Richard Chamberlain). She aggressively flirts with Dr. Archie Bollen (George C. Scott) at a hospital fundraiser. He is about to finalize his divorce from Polo (Shirley Knight). She's fixated on him after bringing in the Mexican boy Oliver into the hospital. She continues to stalk him despite the fact that he's dating May (Pippa Scott). It's a mystery as David's dark side and his abusive father (Joseph Cotten) are revealed.The movie is disjointed with flashbacks and forwards. The quick flashes are too experimental and are better off extracted from the movie. There is something interesting with the disjointed structure being attempted here. It doesn't really work at the beginning, but it becomes more fascinating as more is revealed. It makes me ache to put the pieces together. Yet it struggles at times. I think Oliver's story is interesting which makes it a grind to follow Archie in the present.

The movie's not everyone's cup of tea. The narrative is particularly dense with a number of intersecting themes. That, along with a liberal use of flashbacks, makes the non-linear storyline difficult at times to follow. Nonetheless, the acting is first-rate, while the characters remain compelling in their various agonies. Still, I can't help feeling director Lester is more interested at times in flashy exploration than in intelligible narration. I like the way Petulia (Christie) is fascinated with Dr. Archie's (Scott) healing hands. In a sense, each of the four lead characters has been wounded by others, and is now in search of some kind of healing. Petulia uses 60's ditz to seduce Archie; Polo (Knight) still loves ex-husband Archie, but is settling for less; David (Chamberlain) has some unexplained violent pathology; while Archie looks like he's lost interest in life. How their interactions help or hurt one another amounts to one of the story's main threads. To the film's credit, these relationships appear to approximate real life ones better than in most movies.All in all, it's a rather maddening 100-minutes in all its glitzy complexity, such that I'm not ready to elevate the results the way some reviewers do. Nonetheless, the characters are no movie stereotypes and remain fascinating to follow. I suspect a difficult movie like this depends on how well the viewer can be persuaded to bother filling in the blanks. But that's up to each viewer to decide.

Despite the sweet title and the presence of Julie Christie, or perhaps, because of, this is not the pleasant movie one might, or might not have expected. Certainly when I first saw this upon release, having seen Lester's early b/w films, I was expecting another slightly arty avant-garde outing. But no, indeed this seems to have more than a touch of cinematographer, Nick Roeg. Think, 'Performance' with its darkness and 'Don't Look Now', with its edginess, heart stopping editing and Julie Christie and this film begins to find itself within a different context. Magnificently and correctly, of its time, this time capsule of a movie, captures exceedingly well that perturbing flip from 'swinging sixties' to murder and mayhem, and how true the moment when the 'in love' George C Scott skips across a room while the TV plays back images from the ongoing war in Vietnam. Scott is perhaps a little hard to believe as the casual lover (with good reason by all accounts!), Chamberlain, disturbingly believable and Christie, herself flipping from hip and happy to neurotic and self destructive. Very fine move, just not a very happy ride.