Most films come with emotions wrapped inside. We pick a movie according to the emotion we desire: a musical to be happy, a Western to be thrilled. "Petulia" doesn't work this way. It provides no built-in emotional response at all. Instead, it glides perfectly across the screen, and the idea is for audience the audience to provide its own emotion by responding to it.
Off-hand, I can think of only two other films that worked this way: Antonioni's "Eclipse" and Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad." To one degree or another, both of these inspired impatience, confusion and irritation. Yet when they were analyzed, they turned out to contain nothing more than the components of everyday life. So what were we irritated at? The lives we lead?
I think so. We are living in an increasingly sanitary, air-conditioned, computerized, Saran-wrapped, Muzaked society. Supermarkets aren't food stores anymore, but hypnotic temples of consumer spending. Public buildings are filled these days with half-audible hums (air conditioning) and buzzes (the lights). Elevators play "Whistle a Happy Tune" at you while you stare at the floor numbers over the door. People unconsciously elevate their manners to fit these clean new environments, nodding graciously to each other in the supermarket aisles as if they were actors in a commercial for living better electrically.
This world is brilliantly recreated in "Petulia." Lester has buried his characters in material possessions. They live in a modern, efficient, totalitarian society of the sort that used to be called the "city of the future" by Popular Mechanics. But now the future has arrived, and we ourselves are those future citizens cooking with invisible rays and sleeping in computerized motels. "Petulia" is almost a poem to artifacts. Its hero, played by George C. Scott, is a doctor in a hospital so efficient that the patients seem incidental to the machines.
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