laura_seabrook | Wonderwall

I kept seeing this title in the discount shops at $2 a go. It looked suspicious, so it wasn't until I found a copy in the local library that I watched Wonderwall (1968).

It's directed by Joe Massot who also directed The Song Remains the Same and features Jack MacGowran (The Fearless Vampire Killers, Cul-de-sac) and Jane Birkin (Blowup). The big draw card for me was the soundtrack by George Harrison, which is entirely in his "Indian Style".

But this is a peculiar film. There can't be barely 50 lines of dialogue in it, and I can't remember Birkin saying anything! Instead, she appears as "the woman next door" (named Penny Lane - a reference to the Beatles of course) whom Professor Collins discovers he can spy on when an accident creates a spy hole/camera obscura into the flat next door. There is a vague similarity between this and Hitchcock's Rear Window, but unlike Scotty, Oscar Collins seems creepy more than suspicious. He spends the whole film wrapped in his fantasies about Penny and never says a word to her. As the film progresses he becomes more and more obsessed with her. If this film were made in the 80s, he'd probably turn out to be a stalker, but in this film he seems a (mostly) harmless boffin who ought to know better.

In fact, the film is more a vehicle for fantasy, pop-art, and Harrison's music than anything else. the star of the film for me wasn't any of the characters, but the settings. Collins and Lane live on the top floor of an old block of apartments and each flat is absolutely magnificent. Professor Collins is crammed with books, journals, and assorted scientific paraphernalia, but it trimmings seem whole Arts & Crafts in style and it seemed a sacrilege when he destroys part of that to suit his fantasy. Penny lane's flat is the height of 1960s decoration. We never see it in full until the close of the film. Both flats define the character of those that inhabit them.

The film has several fantasy and dream sequences, which in retrospect seem similar to some Magical Mystery Tour segments, and even a reference (maybe) to a scene from Metropolis (though the latter is probably not intentional. I wonder though how much all this shows a lack of discipline on the part of the director or editor? At 90 minutes it seemed slightly long to me, and the denouement perhaps a bit anticlimactic. But the colour - the colour!