Jack Lemmon: Avanti April 16, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , trackbackWe all have our guilty pleasures, and AVANTI is one of mine. Released back in 1972, it appears now as a quaint time-capsule, an example of a forgotten kind of movie. They simply don’t make them like this anymore. Many will see that as a good thing… but not me.
It’s an oddly charming movie, perhaps it’s the thirty+ years between then and now. The music is wonderful, the setting gorgeous, the acting a delight… it’s magical. Like a fairytale from thirty years ago. You watch thinking it doesn’t work, and yet by movies end you are in love. Well, that’s how it caught me anyway. I think I smiled all the way through the film. I don’t think, even in 1972, that it would have been considered a realistic adult comedy-drama… it’s pure romantic fantasy, and now, in 2008, distanced by time, it appears more fantasy than ever. It’s timeless now.
Jack Lemmon plays a self-centered, all-business American, Wendell Armbruster, who arrives in the idyllic Mediteranean to collect the body of his late father in order to return it to America in time for a huge society funeral. Armbuster’s father was in the Big League, head of a huge business with big political connections. It turns out however that his father was not alone when he died in a car crash- he was with a lover, a woman whose daughter, Pamela Piggot, played by Juliet Mills, has also arrived to see to her mothers funeral. The illicit romance is no surprise to her, and it becomes apparent that the affair had been going on for years, much to Armbruster’s shock and disgust. His father, it seemed, led a double-life. A consumate father, husband and business mogul in America, every year for a month he retired to the Med where he led a romantic affair with an Englishwoman, the two of them treated like Royalty by the islanders.
The beauty of the film is in how Lemmon handles his characters arc, as he arrives one man and departs another. Armbruster completely transforms before our eyes, emulating his father just as Pamela emulates her mother, the two of them falling in love with each other amidst the peaceful sun-drenched idyll of the island. It is so subtle you hardly notice as his cold heart melts away, but you are suddenly aware, as the film ends, that this is not the same man who arrived at the film’s start.
The script is warm and whimsical, the comedy light, the music bewitching… the film is a guilty joy. It’s a film to return to on any wet, grey, afternoon/evening, just as the island is a place for the two characters to return to every summer. You won’t see AVANTI on many peoples lists of favourite Billy Wilder/Jack Lemmon films. Thats understandable- this is no THE APARTMENT or SOME LIKE IT HOT. It is somewhat overlong, some of the humour can fall flat, it is dated to a degree… but neverthess there is a romantic warmth to this film that is hypnotic. I could sit down and take it all in again already.
Comments»
I appreciate your enthusiasm, and really a nice write-up, but it’s quite the undersell. I don’t think there’s anything guilty about Avanti! at all, and I do think it’s Wilder’s best film after The Apartment (and maybe One, Two, Three). It’s only dated in the sense that most any film from the 1970s that’s set in that time period will seem to be different than a more recent take. I’m really not sure where the superior modern comedy-drama films are, but they don’t seem to really be getting made at all nowadays, certainly not on the level of enduring past any whiffs of nostalgia in thirty years’ time.
I honestly don’t think I’ve seen a Billy Wilder film that I didn’t like at some level. While ‘Avanti’ isn’t my favorite, it does still push my buttons - and count me in as another one who loves the music.
Thanks for the comments, I’m pleasantly surprised that I had a positive response- I expected to get flamed for enjoying such a romantic (old-fashioned is probably the wrong term?) movie. I find the symmetry of the couple returning every year to the island and the viewer returning to the movie endlessly fascinating. It’s interesting in the modern age of DVDs etc how we watch, experience and re-experience certain movies in ways unknown back when films like AVANTI first appeared.
Thanks for the heads up on this ghost. Having been directed to (and fallen in love with) ‘One Two Three’ I’m now allowing myself to be thrust towards ‘Avanti!’ Top of my list of Wilder wannasees remains ‘Ace in the Hole’, however; difficult until a cheaper alternative to Criterion’s R1 arrives.