Thisbe and Pyramus loved through a hole in a wall, and that made it to Midsummer Night's Dream, so surely there's room for a 1968 Britpop film called WONDERWALL that's really more about "all the lonely people," like Prof. Oscar Collins (Jack McGowran - forced to pantomime most of his performance when his real strength is in his great oratory voice) as a peeping tom scientist who works at a water plant but really only cares about his microscope of cellular life - until he hallucinates his neighbor, Penny Lane (Jane Birkin) therein. As a Vogue model regularly modeling in her apartment studio for a photographer lad (Brian Walsh) who dresses in Apple records green, Birkin is so gorgeous and young, with such heavenly legs and crazy fashions- that we want to see her all the time, but Joe Massot's vision is a might classicist, so be prepared for the prof.
Penny's pad is one of the stars of the show, so every shot is gold, and other colours too thanks to the eye popping blu-ray restoration from the good folks at Shout! Jean Harlow and Garbo to place her in the context of enigmatic desire objects via posters on the wall. A handsome young bloke boyfriend (Ian Quarrier) meanwhile drops in on the professor to borrow ice and late sugar, and based on his behaviour it's clear he would rather shag a splenderific selection of birds in more groovy outfits and awful wigs, including Anita Pallenberg, with whom he tries to get Penny in a three-way, than help raise Jane's forthcoming baby. Neither Pallenberg nor Birkin ever even speaks a word near as I can figure, but the soundtrack is a nonstop feast for the enhanced hear, with George Harrison's psychedelic melange of sitars, guitars, harmonica, tamboura and Indian horns howling, tinkling, and buzzing like an array of electric insects nearly nonstop. It's an entomological freakfest - a kind of mute Beavis and Butthead if they were just one guy who barely spoke but watched vintage Joi Lansing Scopitones through round holes in a wall, with only Norma Shearer in RIPTIDE (1934) and Isabella Rossellini in GREEN PORNO (2008) able to compete in the insect costume category (and no spider ala Lansing's "Web of Love" to provide a threat) and Harrison's buzzing tamboura and sitar hovering deep inside your ear ossicles.
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| From top: WONDERWALL, RIP TIDE, GREEN PORNO |
The source story is by Gérard Brach, who wrote REPULSION and CUL-DE-SAC and THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS for Polanski before this, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who only also wrote VANISHING POINT (1972) after. So where does that leave us? One gets the impression of Brach's earlier work that he never meant Professor Collins to be any kind of Monsieur Hulot-Chaplin type whimsy generator but a skeevy older version of Terence Stamp in THE COLLECTOR who doesn't need to abduct a specimen for his jar because one lives right next door, and there's plenty of air holes. The idea that Collins loses himself and begins to demolish his apartment to better make a million holes in the wall to peep through is downright creepy but doubly so when we watch him make those holes under the steam of a bouncy polka and double projection speed. This fella Collins needs a good slashening by Catherine Deneuve's razor, especially once he makes it his business to break into her pad and start nosing around. That's the fundamental problem, or maybe solution, to this film --that young Penny just happens to be trying to snuff it right at the same evening he busts in. Good old Collins! Even so, he should really be in jail.
But maybe it's also because this weird pro-scopophile angle that it's ultimately interesting beyond a pretty light show and showcase for Birkin's heavenly gams. If you go in expecting it to be a dull story of a dweebish scientist shuffling around his apartment in his pajamas, some kind of reverse-gendered REPULSION tale of mental disintegration coupled to some old nudie cutie comedy like THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS, then the pop art YELLOW SUBMARINER tangents will throw you left of field. If you go in expecting a pop art whimsy-fest be prepared to be rather unnerved by the inordinate amount of time we watch Collins "reacting" to all he peeps like some silent film clown impression of a Mr. Jones / Father McKenzie bowler hat type Brit in a pretentious student art film, like if REAR WINDOW's Jimmy Stewart had no friends, nurse, and didn't even know Grace Kelly, but spied on her younger incarnation as a struggling model, and there was no murder, aside from a suicide attempt-- and we were somehow expected to root for a delusional creep too shy and out of it to even realize how creepy he's being, figuring a movie about him watching old Grace Kelly through a hole was enough of a movie subject, especially with imagining having a big doofus duel with her boyfriend for her hand in wedlock, using as weapons things like giant oversize pens, lipsticks, and cigarettes while the lime green photographer snaps pictures, all so he can have her loving load his hookah while he stares off into space. Really, if you're going to imagine yourself a young turk, why not be cool? Who pictures themselves as an old square duffer trying vainly to look hip? That defeats the whole purpose.
Now I should preface by saying I adore Michael Powell but I'm too skeeved out by PEEPING TOM to ever see it again, ditto THE COLLECTOR, and I can't stand Monsieur Hulot and all those damned (in my mind) terrible Jacques Tati comedies, and I loathe BILLY LIAR. And when it comes to the Beatles I'm more a Harrison-Ringo-John fan, and find some of Paul's songs insufferably cheeky and guileless. Paul was always trying to bring in the lonely old timers and bouncy children along on the picnic, dumbing shit down so they understand, while John and George were about leading the brave into the future (and scaring the shit out of children like me in the 70s, who of course loved the Paul songs). And there's that vibe here -- the colorful psychedelic whirligig is seen at arm's length while the drabness of foggy London codgers is front and center, the way, say, the Beatle's MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR (below) tried to be cheeky fun for one and all but instead was kind of like a nightmare of banal fever dream - a bus loaded with middle-aged and dowdy proles, instead of lovely upper crust birds and fellas. Just look at the drab washed out image of the four of them in their animal maskies below - as creepy as the brown bear man in THE SHINING or the citizens of Summer's Isle.
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| From Top: MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, SHINING, WICKER MAN |
For all that, again, WONDERWALL can't be dismissed easily -- it has a lot of British fans, like old Liam Gallagher at the band Oasis, who wrote a song about it. I imagine if you discovered the film like old Liam did, likely after a night of ecstasy at the club and finding it randomly at two AM on BBC IV or something while still tripping, or saw a super rare screening of it on the wall behind some go-go dancers while falling through a K-hole, then well then you might love it. And seeing it all swanky with pop art colors exploding off of the screen on the blu-ray while Harrison's music flows remastered and earthy-ethereal in a gorgeous remix, then it has druggy pop art allure: both apartments eventually look amazing thanks to set design by art collective (and Beatle haberdashers and mural painters) The Fool, and Birkin is progressively more and more gorgeous. So on the proper chemicals I imagine it would be quite the thing, and for the rest of us can certainly provide some help in the old spatchka department.
But this guy Prof. Oscar Collins is half the show and that's 100% the trouble. If we come to the blu-ray we come for a psychedelic plasmatic gorgeous pop art happening, presumably, not a kitchen sink Benny Fool on the Hill, and that we do end up with one addresses the lingering need in the counterculture to address the problem, in Britain especially, of this type of fellow, i.e. the judgmental old duffer. We just shush them away now in our youth obsessed culture, there's no doubt anymore that teens rule the marketplace, and old people need to go watch CBS or be trampled underfoot. But in sixties Swinging London, there was only the BBC and cinema --and British cinema has always been a mixed bag, with a socialist blue (collar) streak and a hard-lost sense of propriety and a penchant for turning nearly ever genre of film dishwater dull (with studios like Hammer, and cheeky shows like THE AVENGERS being exceptions as well as indicative of the problem, dealing with the suffocation of Britain's class system it by addressing it head-on, ala Monty Python. And if an older fella really wanted to know what was going on in the swinging bird's pad, there was not yet media to let him know he was being an old fool letting his bourgeois prurience get him in a stiff upper liplock. He might feel he has a right to move in and arrest them all if things look suspiciously salacious through the keyhole (and he can't admit to himself he too wanted to smoke hash with a naked Marianne Faithful on a bearskin rug). And he never doubts we'd love to see him seeing it all - that is to say we are continually thrust into the idea of needing to see who we're seeing through seeing, that we need an old prude mediary, like old guared neo-conservatives putting police tape around a young girl's womb.For all his faults, Woody Allen at least understood how that works, that basic truth of viewer psychology. His going after girls young enough to actually be his daughters isn't something he feels we'd root for, yet is something he can't let go of, like a secret guilty conscience, but that's the roots of art. Polanski is on the run, but Allen strides free, and WONDERWALL is somehow convinced it's Allen when it's Polanski, the way Michael Jackson was convinced, that their artistic drive is coming from somewhere other than fear and the compulsive need to create distracting noises to cover up the hideous heartbeat under the Poe floorboards. Allen's years of analysis have given him enough awareness to understand that it is the beating of his own hideous heart, his guilty conscience, and so his distracting noises are conveyed as comedy. And Polanski's awareness comes from feeling the need to film the heart directly, that the heart is all he can see and so forgive him if he doesn't even deign to make distracting noises. But Joe Massot's WONDERWALL is so distracted by his own distracting noises it forgets all about the heart, and so mistakes its beating as the sound of butterfly wings, that it is the fifth Beatle, and so he never asks himself the tough sordid Flannery O'Connor question: isn't every butterfly collector more liable to sniff through his prey's old cocoon drawer than save her from self-immolating?
By the end of the film we more or less resolve this episode in Collins' life, but for the rest of us we can't help but feel like Woody Allen trapped on that sad sack train at the start of STARDUST MEMORIES, with half the movie spent watching Sharon Stone blow kisses through a window through a screen through another window. But hey - it was 1968! The director, Joe Massot, had one more trick up his sleeve, after this: in 1976, he was fired off of Led Zeppelin's SONG REMAINS THE SAME. He was Page's neighbor and had been pestering Grant about it and they'd all knew WONDERWALL, his only other film, had Beatles mystique (and they hadn't seen it). And SONG I did see for the first time after a wild party, with no expectations, and a bunch of friends of some girl I was halfway hooked up with (a tale for a different post-here!) So set and setting are everything, but most importantly, no Professor Collins, no Monsieur Hulot, just the crazy, violent, talented, dangerous, beautiful youth of the Zeppelin. We in the dark will be our own Collinses, thank you. And while WONDERWALL is a worthy curio for Beatles fans and Britpop lovers, I'd rather not be reminded how long ago that wild party was -and that I'm now just a peeper, a spy in the house of love, a fool on on the hill, it's even worse. So take your concern for the bowler hat chaps and shove it where no one will hear / no one comes near. All the lonely people hate looking at images of lonely people looking at images of hot birds of youth. Cut out the mediary who'd pin Jane Birkin's wings to the wall so you can pay him for a glimpse, and free her with thine own electric eyes! If she never comes back, you never really saw her to begin with, and so adieu!
