"Lists are what they tell you to begin with if you want to be on top of things."
"Lists are what you write when you are going shopping for things you don't need as much to remember regardless."
--Monica de la Torre from Public Domain
"Lists are what you write when you are going shopping for things you don't need as much to remember regardless."
--Monica de la Torre from Public Domain
Lists might conceivably replace the essay one day. Perhaps there is a grad student in sociology somewhere working out the empirical details of whether people turn to lists more than essays nowadays, but the research could only add a statistic to what is already apparent; that people prefer examples to reasons and a discovery to a defense.
Only a few months ago, one such list caught my attention. It was the Harvard suggested list of films for undergraduates to see, and I have returned to the list at least a dozen times. The Harvard list is not a canon of the greatest films of all-time, but rather, guides the undergraduate towards films that will supplement their predictable viewing selections. On this supplementary list is Petulia.
Richard Lester's Petulia is laced in all sorts of pop iconography. We see Big Brother and Holding Company and the Grateful Dead in snippets, Petulia's (Julie Christie's) amazing late-60s wardrobe, fairly cool cars, and all of this set in San Francisco. The film is also chock-full of flashbacks and what are probably anachronisms, adding to the overall pop facade.
Underneath the stylized story-telling, the plot is plain and simple. Petulia propositions Archie (George C. Scott), they have a romance that never quite works out, and they go their separate ways. If there is a motive behind it all, it is that Petulia is trapped in bad circumstances and looking for a way out, but not at the expense of faking love. She wants something real, and so does Archie, though he does not know it is Petulia until it is too late. As director Richard Lester said, "It's a very real film about two people trying to get through to each other." The operative word here is "trying."
What sets the film apart is its sense of dealing with life as it comes, and precisely that alone. The film seems to bump its head against these limits as if real life deserves a place on celluloid even if other movies take another route. It is not a great story, just a believable one, and for this reason, it maintains a place on Harvard's list of supplementary films (the only list I have seen it included on). Furthermore, as a supplement, it is a film that informs our core sense of what a film can be by not being the average 60s viewing experience, but distinctly itself; something of a one hit wonder.
IMDb rates this film 6.9 stars out of 10
Film 101 rates this film 4 stars out of 5
