For those who like Hollywood movies trying to be hip

Another of the movies that I recorded due to it having an interesting synopsis and recently got around to watching was the 1968 film Petulia. Made at the height of the counterculture era, the movie is obviously trying to keep up with the times, but that's something which makes it a decidedly acquired taste.

The movie opens up at a charity ball in San Francisco designed to raise money for people who have suffered debilitating injuries in car accidents. Among the people attending is Dr. Archie Bollen (George C. Scott), an orthopedic surgeon who operates on the patients who are the focus of the benefit. Also there is Petulia Danner (Julie Christie). As we eventually learn, she's the foster parent to a young child who got hit by a bus and for whom Dr. Bollen performed the operation, which is why she has a good reason to be there too.

The two also have something else in common, which is that they're both in marriages which seem well on their way to divorce. Dr. Bollen is further down that road, no longer living with his wife Polo (Shirley Knight), and having an affair with another woman while only seeing his children on weekends. Petulia is in a loveless marriage to David (Richard Chamberlain), a controlling man who uses his father's (Joseph Cotten in a small role) influence to maintain that control while most likely being abusive to Petulia along the way.

Petulia meets Archie, and finding out what they have in common, immediately propositions him, with the two going to an odd urban motel where everybody parks right next to their hotel room door, except that everything is in a parking garage and the "front desk" is all remote, which would have been very uncommon in 1968. Petulia is odd in other ways, too, stealing a tuba and taking it to Archie's bachelor pad where she apparently expects him to sleep with her.

As all of this unfolds, we learn about the pasts of Archie and especially Petulia in a series of flashbacks that aren't so obviously flashbacks at first; this is how we learn the full story of Petulia's becoming a foster parent and how the kid wound up getting in that accident. However, because the flashbacks aren't particularly obvoius, it makes the narrative structure a bit of a mess.

And that's the huge problem with Petulia. It's easy to see what the producers as well as director Richard Lester were going for, but unlike some other movies from the same era that had a daring narrative structure -- I'm particularly thinking of Two for the Road -- it doesn't always work. If the movie had kept a linear structure, I'd have a lot less of a problem with Petulia. It still wouldn't be one of my favorites, to be honest, but it would be easier to see the good things about it, especially the view of San Francisco as it was in 1968.

Still, it's another of those movies where I can easily understand why people who want something arty and deliberately trying to upend Hollywood conventions would like it. So for some people, it's definitely going to be more than worth a watch.