Petulia

Richard Lester's Petulia feels like a very typical late 60s film. It belongs to the bunch of films of the initial years of what came to be known as the "new hollywood" and which later flourished in the early seventies. These films were inspired by the modernistic European art films, specially the new wave. These films emphasised form and style over content, eschewed simple psychological portraits with straightforward and cliched character motivations. They also rejected the conventional, linear, cause-and-effect narrative in favour of discontiuity both in time and in place, something that more than anything else separated these from the classical hollywood cinema.

Although it appears very confounding and complex at the beginning, Petulia actually tells a rather simple story of a love triangle involving the eponymous character (played by Julie Christie at her stylish best) who is living in an abusive marriage and who starts an affair out of whim with a doctor who is in the process of divorcing his wife. The story is told in a very non-linear way with many flashbacks and flash forwards. It is actually quite confusing at the beginning, because some cuts show the events prior to their meeting and others show the violent events which are yet to come but slowly everything starts to fall into place. The use of flashbacks is quite common in classical narrative cinema but the flashback here is nothing like in Casablanca for example. They are not meant to solve a narrative problem but rather to capture a tone and mood of disorientation and also jolt the viewer into awareness of the formal aspects of the storytelling.

Petulia is also modernistic in one other way. Rather than probing into the psychological depth of the lead characters, it is more interested in capturing the feel of the city of San Francisco, specially the fabled San Francisco of 1968. Everything in the city seems colour coded - buses, road signs, the clothes people wear on the streets, the facades of the buildings. It is all very colourful but it is also very inhuman, artificial and alienating. Even the hospital seems to be colour coded! In fact in one of the scenes when a patient asks why the TV set is not working, she is told that it is just a facade which is there only to make her want the "real" thing. The film also makes it clear in this way that it is this artificiality that is creating the rifts in interpersonal relationships though it doesn't belabour this theme very much. A few scenes actually reminded me of Antonioni, in his subjects and themes if not in his visual style. There are also some trippy montage sequences involving strange visual designs and also a sequence with Grateful Dead again placing the film into a very specific period - that of sixties counterculture.

All the three leads are very good and there is a bravura cameo by the always reliable Joseph Cotten as well, but the film finally belongs to the director and his team of technicians. Julie Christie always looked very stylish but she is even more so in this film. Fashion buffs will have a specially good time watching all those clothes she gets to wear in this film. Nicolas Roeg was the DP of the film and he did an extraordinary job with everything - the colour, texture, lighting, dissolves everything is just perfect and extremely evocative. It also appears that he probably stole his flashback, flashforward, jump cut style that became his trademark in his later films as a director from this film.

An article on the senses of cinema website about the film.