Julie Christie #5

And here we have the first film on the program that I can wholeheartedly embrace, without reservation. It's also the first on the bill that I was actively looking forward to. I forget why; most likely some offhand comment by Glenn Kenny or someone. The film is Joseph Losey's 1970 Cannes Grand Prix winner The Go-Between. It's a pretty standard story of class conflict in the English countryside in 1900, before class distinctions were questioned. But what could be standard and simple is elevated by several things: Losey's organic and fluid direction, in which not a single shot, camera angle or cut is wasted or takes away from the whole; Michael Legrand's building and melodramatic classical piano score; pristine sets and art direction; brilliant performances by Julie Christie, Alan Bates (again), Margaret Leighton, Dominic Guard, and Michael Redgrave; and, most importantly, one of my new favorite scripts ever by Harold Pinter, adapted from L.P. Harltley's novel of the same name.

Leo (Dominic Guard), gets invited to his rich friend's estate and is taken in very graciously by the whole family for the summer. He quickly befriends his friend's older sister Julie Christie (I love not giving her characters names). He quickly falls in love with her, and she begins using him to carry messages and letters to the neighboring tenant farmer (Alan Bates) with whom she's carrying on a secret relationship, despite being promised to a wealthy viscount. Slowly Leo begins to understand what's happening around him and his fantasy summer unravels into traumatizing ends. The whole film is told in flashback by an old Julie Christie and an impotent, chubby, older Leo (a brilliant Michael Redgrave).

What makes the film so special is what's not shown on screen, and how all those components listed above make what isn't shown perfectly clear. We never need to see Bates and Christie on the screen together to feel the sexual tension and chemistry between them. Without ever saying anything, it becomes so clear that maybe Christie's mother (Margaret Leighton) and the rest of the house no more than they're letting on.

As for Christie, she is so perfectly lovely and sweet, cold and abusive, innocent and knowing all at the same time. In a film full of near perfect components, Christie truly does stand still stand out as amazing. I do find it interesting though that both The Go-Between and Far from the Madding Crowd feature Christie in the lead role but don't exactly tell stories about her. Instead they both seem to use her characters as centers and catalysts around which to tell the stories. This was more Leo's perspective and story; Madding Crowd liberally switched perspectives between her 3 suitors. And if we throw out the horrid In Search of Gregory, all of the Christie films so far have featured her as unobtainable and mostly unknowable characters. We've failed to get close to her time and time again. It's amazing that she's made these difficult characters so easy to watch and so three dimensional. I firmly believe her farmer in Far From the Madding Crowd would have been just an attention obsessed, annoying stereotype rich girl in most others' hands.


The Go-Between: 9.5/10
Julie Christie in The Go-Between: 9.0/10


Next up: seriously, it's going to be Billy Liar this time.