Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind is enervating, overstuffed and self-indulgent, yet I am very pleased it exists in its present form and am eager to watch it again. Like many film buffs (OK, a few), I scoured the web over the past decades to watch whatever bits I could of this unfinished project and am fairly satisfied with the work the restorers did to mold the footage into a simulacrum of Welles' vision. A lot of the footage that was discarded, particularly a post-screening Q&A , was redundant. What remains seems very much a Welles film, for both good and ill.
There is much to deride. Welles' theme of the debilitating effects of celebrity and mass media seems obvious and overwrought. The shots of John Huston, Welles' stand-in, being bombarded by camera lights as he makes his arrival is an egregious example of this. The insertion of an opening monologue by Peter Bogdanovich specifically mentioning the rise of social media is a feeble attempt to make Welles relevant; which is another thread contained in the film: that time has passed the old genius/gasbag by and he is lost in the New Hollywood. What gives The Other Side of the Wind its charge and fascination is that it serves as an auto-critique. Welles here seems fully determined to puncture his own mythos.
That doesn't mean he isn't above taking potshots at others stranded in the Hollywood pleasure dome. The Other Side of the Wind is largely a portrait of the back-stabbing and bitchery of the film biz. Barbs are directed at Pauline Kael and Robert Evans, but overall Welles takes an ambivalent view of the hangers-on and various Hollywood flotsam. He has some sympathy for those who have joined his once merry band and now face their inevitable decline and demise. Welles' baroque style has tended to type his supporting casts as grotesques, think of the town gossips in The Magnificent Ambersons, but here there is also empathy for the flunkies and attendants. The quick cutting method employed here, which seemed gauche when I first saw the footage years ago, now strikes me as an apt way to evoke the garishness and claustrophobia of early 70s Hollywood. Welles' ultimate stance is one of ambivalence, he loves the intoxication of filmmaking, but despises the sickening business machinations.
The haphazard nature of this production is evident in its bizarre array of performances. Huston, Bogdanovich, Norman Foster, Paul Stewart, Mercedes McCambridge, Edmond O'Brien and Gregory Sierra provide memorable moments. Cameron Mitchell and Susan Strasberg struggle to no avail. Lilli Palmer is surprisingly effective as a thinly veiled Dietrich. As in Touch of Evil, she functions as the protagonist's discarded conscience. Robert Random and Oja Kodar mostly show off their toned bodies in the film within the film, a poke at the overly aestheticized ennui of Antonioni. There is a little to much of this footage despite an enjoyably bonkers sex scene between the two in a moving vehicle.
The Other Side of the Wind is teeming, perhaps too teeming, with provocative themes that are half masticated: a critique of machismo, a current of homosexual panic (the flipside of machismo), meditations on mortality, loyalty and waning artistic powers. It is all too much and not enough. However, Welles appears quite self aware of this throughout the film, his most exhibitionistic and frantic. The mantle of failed genius was thrust upon him early in his career and here he ruefully toys with that canard. Welles, ever ambivalent, wants to be Ahab and Moby Dick, but his personality and ideas tend to overwhelm his images. Still, The Other Side of the Wind contains multitudes and my mere words cannot do it justice. Welles captures his fear of losing the "rough magic" of his artistic powers, but this work shows he still had plenty of mojo.
No comments:
Post a Comment