This film has an attitude, and the attitude is, "the director knows something you don't, and he's going to amuse himself by tossing riddles at an audience of common folk he's looking down his nose at." (This was typical of Lester's work. "We take acid, and we're cool. You don't, and you're stupid.")
Lester tended to put style before both character and story, and that may be why his films haven't stood up for larger audiences.
There actually =is= a story in this muddle, and it's not bad. Petulia herself provides the major clues near the beginning when she tells the good doctor that her mother was a prostitute and her sister was, too. In my line of work, the instant I hear revelations like that I start listening more carefully.
Then we see that she's married a malignantly narcissistic sociopath. But the movie was 2/3's over before Joe Cotton's monologue in Petulia's hospital room gave the thing enough historical traction to make the foregoing and the remainder even remotely sensible.
I read about a dozen other reviews here on IMDb and saw that most people see this the way most people saw "Mad Men" when it first hit cable three years ago. The vast majority of comments were about how faithful the show was to the early '60s as the viewers recalled it.
But few could see what "Mad Men" was =about=, and unless one watches "Petulia" very carefully (and maybe even if they =do=), it may remain equally mysterious... if entrancing Lester has made the first three quarters of the film so hyper-artistic in the service of =his= sense of intrigue, that it will be a "long, strange trip" for most viewers. And in the world of a thousand cable TV channels, that usually means, "Where's my remote?"
Orson Welles, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni had all used chronology-flipping. But in films like "Kane," as in AMC's "Mad Men," the technique works well because the characters are so compelling and the flashbacks are relatively self-evident. Here, however, the flashbacks are intentionally confusing, and the characters are way too murky until the final 20 minutes.
There were people who bought into "Petulia" in the '60s because of their LSD and peyote trips. But a film about narcissistic sadomasochism among the unduly wealthy need not require a viewer's own masochism to make a point. And that point would be that "squares" like Scott's "Archie," who were socialized to common notions of "normality," will have a hard time understanding the "normality" of those outside their own mundane, middle class paradigm.
I'm sorry, but I really sense a lot of Lester himself in Chamberlain's and Cotton's characters.
A final word about the title character: The only people capable of forming obsessive attachments to sadistic narcissists are people who were raised to be masochistic with sadistic narcissists. And if they are as physically gifted as the beautiful, narcissistic-but-masochistic Petulia, they may become very compelling -- if frustrating -- attractions for those they seduce and mystify.
I understand Petulia was meant (as a character) to be as devoid of humanity as her husband and his father. Even so, I didn't believe Petulia's "seduction" for ten seconds.
Lester tended to put style before both character and story, and that may be why his films haven't stood up for larger audiences.
There actually =is= a story in this muddle, and it's not bad. Petulia herself provides the major clues near the beginning when she tells the good doctor that her mother was a prostitute and her sister was, too. In my line of work, the instant I hear revelations like that I start listening more carefully.
Then we see that she's married a malignantly narcissistic sociopath. But the movie was 2/3's over before Joe Cotton's monologue in Petulia's hospital room gave the thing enough historical traction to make the foregoing and the remainder even remotely sensible.
I read about a dozen other reviews here on IMDb and saw that most people see this the way most people saw "Mad Men" when it first hit cable three years ago. The vast majority of comments were about how faithful the show was to the early '60s as the viewers recalled it.
But few could see what "Mad Men" was =about=, and unless one watches "Petulia" very carefully (and maybe even if they =do=), it may remain equally mysterious... if entrancing Lester has made the first three quarters of the film so hyper-artistic in the service of =his= sense of intrigue, that it will be a "long, strange trip" for most viewers. And in the world of a thousand cable TV channels, that usually means, "Where's my remote?"
Orson Welles, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni had all used chronology-flipping. But in films like "Kane," as in AMC's "Mad Men," the technique works well because the characters are so compelling and the flashbacks are relatively self-evident. Here, however, the flashbacks are intentionally confusing, and the characters are way too murky until the final 20 minutes.
There were people who bought into "Petulia" in the '60s because of their LSD and peyote trips. But a film about narcissistic sadomasochism among the unduly wealthy need not require a viewer's own masochism to make a point. And that point would be that "squares" like Scott's "Archie," who were socialized to common notions of "normality," will have a hard time understanding the "normality" of those outside their own mundane, middle class paradigm.
I'm sorry, but I really sense a lot of Lester himself in Chamberlain's and Cotton's characters.
A final word about the title character: The only people capable of forming obsessive attachments to sadistic narcissists are people who were raised to be masochistic with sadistic narcissists. And if they are as physically gifted as the beautiful, narcissistic-but-masochistic Petulia, they may become very compelling -- if frustrating -- attractions for those they seduce and mystify.
I understand Petulia was meant (as a character) to be as devoid of humanity as her husband and his father. Even so, I didn't believe Petulia's "seduction" for ten seconds.