Petulia

Petulia
by Richard Lester

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DVD details

Actor: Arthur Hill, George C. Scott, Julie Christie, Richard Chamberlain, Shirley Knight
Director: Richard Lester
Brand: CHRISTIE,JULIE
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 105 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-06-20
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video

DVD Reviews of Petulia

DVD Review: One of the Greats!
Summary: 5 Stars

It took me awhile to see this film. Most of the time it was out of print and unavailable. It isn't a film they show on Sunday afternoons when people are spending time at home. It goes deeper and more complicated than most people are able to fathom, especially when watching it in a casual manner on TV. Luckily, I found a old copy of a paperback I probably got at a garage sale years ago in my basement. The book is wonderful and I highly recommend it. The book also helps understand the way the movie is put together as they are essentially the same. A doctor who leaves his wife and children with no particular goal or reason becomes involved with a younger married woman who portrays herself as a carefree kook. She presents herself as a carefree version of a fling but immediately it becomes clear that casual is the furthest thing from her mind. She is a woman trying to free herself from a marriage for money which has become a nightmare. Her husband is wife beater of the most violent kind and his family participates in the constant cover up. She is a pawn in a game that could get herself killed. Petulia seems to believe that the doctor could save her from the abusive relationship along with a young boy from Mexico her husband essentially kidnapped and abused also. A very sad touching film of two good people stuck in very sad situations. One of seemingly benign career dedication and social conventions. The other of tighter social conventions and a threat to her life. The story is beautifully told but does demand attention. It is a film that has yet to be surpassed in its depiction of the 1960s.

DVD Review: Pretentious claptrap.
Summary: 2 Stars

Julie Christie parades her proletariat pout through 2 hours of psychedelic pretensions, all of which are seemingly supposed to suggest great profundity and hidden meaning--but don't be fooled--this is an empty parcel wrapped in glittering paper, with a core as resoundingly vacuous as the society it attempts to depict.

The story, (such as it is) concerns a chic young woman (Miss Christie as "Petulia") who picks up children and middle aged men with casual indifference to convention, because she's "kooky" (recall that our anti-heroine here inherits this voguish characteristic from her cinematic sisters in "Georgy Girl," "Darling" and anything with Sandy Duncan). The reason for this, to which the story eventually arrives, but which it anticipates with frequent visual flashbacks, lies in an unhappy marriage with wealthy pretty boy Richard Chamberlin.

In this instance, Petulia's latest adult male conquest is a recently divorced physician, (George C. Scott) with whom she commits adultery, between kooky capers (installing a greenhouse in a residential urban apartment, shopping out the store in an all night grocery etc.) and pronouncements such as "I think I've just found the cure for cancer".

Amid the kookiness, and in order to assure us that this is all to be taken in deadly earnest, the story includes an incident in which Petulia is hospitalized after sustaining multiple lacerations in Mr. Scott's apartment. This sequence replete with ambulance runs, and much blood is designed to arouse sympathy for any in the audience who haven't yet warmed to our anti-heroine, who also turns out to be expecting a baby.

Mr. Scott wears an expression throughout the film suggesting the worst case of indigestion in history, (and by the way it's the only expression he wears) and one wonders if his dissatisfaction is with the script or the character.

In any case, he's unsympathetic, not the least of which is because his ex-wife is portrayed by the exquisitely lovely Shirley Knight of the golden blonde hair and guileless cornflower blue eyes. Her performance, so dead on target, saves the film, in at least those sequences in which she appears.

Along the way, every visual clich? in the book is thrown in at some point including protesting hippies, daisy covered vans, strobe lit discotheques, and rock bands. The faddish choppy editing through which these scenes appear fleetingly is about as subtle as a sledge hammer.

If the point of this cinematic charade is that modern society is filled with poseurs, then "Darling" from three years earlier made the same point much better. In this case, "Petulia" is the poseur par excellence.

DVD Review: Um sorry, I Don't Get It
Summary: 2 Stars

I found this movie to be very odd, and VERY hard to follow. While I agree Julie Christie is indeed beautiful, it is not enough to "save" this film which I found to be quite boring. I think the people in it spend a bit to much time trying to be "cool". The film takes itself too seriously and scatter-brained character of Ms. Christie doesn't help. I get the feeling that the director thought with beauty of Julie Christie who needs a storyline. Sorry, but wrong. The only "plus" for me were the 60's clothes and scenes of my hometown area of San Francisco. Other than that, I think I'll give this film the snooze of the month award.

DVD Review: loved it!
Summary: 5 Stars

I had seen this movie at least 20 years ago and I always wanted to see it again from a more mature viewpoint. The acting is excellent. Shirley Knight especially. This time around I wasn't as sympathetic towards the Julie Christie character, victim yes but also enabler. George C Scott amazing. The film quality is excellent. Julie Christie looks stunningly beautiful. Flawless skin. In hindsight we mock some of the crazy 60's fashions but seeing the clothes and hairstyles on Julie they actually work!

DVD Review: not bad
Summary: 2 Stars

maybe a classic to some but definately an artifact of its time. a movie for me that is interesting,pretentious and boring at the same time. i suggest you rent it first because if you don't like it,you'll be wondering what all the fuss was about.

Description of Petulia

"It's a very real film about two people trying to get through to each other," director Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night) says of his landmark romance Petulia, set in summer-of-love-era San Francisco. There Julie Christie plays a unhappily married socialite trying to get through to a recently divorced doctor (George C. Scott), who in his own words just wants to "feel something." He'll soon feel, even hurt, a lot. Because we know why kooky Petulia so desperately reaches out. As Lester zigzags through the flashbacks and flash-forwards of cinematographer Nicolas Roeg's startling images and Lawrence B. Marcus' knowing screenplay, Petulia's jigsaw pieces form a celluloid time capsule of life and love in the turbulent '60s.

DVD Features:
Featurette
Theatrical Trailer

This Richard Lester film will tell you more about how confusing the '60s were than any hackneyed NBC miniseries ever could. In this fragmented love story, told in a nonlinear fashion that bounces back and forth in time, George C. Scott plays a newly divorced surgeon who meets a charming if scattered young woman, Petulia (Julie Christie). He falls into an affair with her, only to discover that she is married to a seemingly normal guy (Richard Chamberlain)--who also happens to be extremely abusive. But his efforts to extricate her from the marriage, set against the flower-power scene in San Francisco, only frustrate him with her indecisiveness. The film features performances by the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and captures a sense of the confusion caused by the youthquake that swept the nation. --Marshall Fine

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