Petulia
Director: Richard Lester
Year Released: 1968
Rating: 1.0
Spastic relic from the 60's tells the (essentially) simple story of a doctor (George C. Scott) and his fling with a vacant ditz (Julie Christie) but edited so that the chronology is all scrambled (time and space means nothing to Lester), a dubious technique which would (regrettably) influence Nicolas Roeg ... who, incidentally, is the film's cinematographer. It's hard finding the brilliance in Christie's performance since the film's ostentatious presentation is the first thing you notice; although Lester goes into the correlation between the film's subject matter and the 'mood' of the late 60's (with Vietnam going on and people like my Father being shot at), I struggled to find much to this (blame age or ignorance or both - maybe you just had to be there). I think Cassavetes' Faces, released around the same year, does a more cohesive job of conveying the emotional and marital discontent of America, without resorting to psychedelics or storytelling gimmicks.
