Petulia · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Julie Christie hauls a stolen tuba into a hotel lobby. She doesn't play it, doesn't explain it, doesn't seem to want it — the tuba is just a thing she has put between herself and the next bad minute of her life. That gesture is the whole film in miniature. Petulia Danner does things constantly, brightly, at speed, and none of it changes anything. She is running, and she is standing still, and Richard Lester found a way to film both at once.

Deleuze has a name for what is breaking down here, and it makes the film legible in a way the love story never quite does. He called it the crisis of the action-image. Classical Hollywood ran on a simple circuit: a character sees a situation, feels the pressure of it, and acts to change it — the cowboy draws, the doctor cuts, longing converts into a kiss. Deleuze called that circuit sensory-motor: perception flows into action and the world reorganizes around the deed. Petulia is a film in which that circuit has quietly snapped. George C. Scott's Archie, a surgeon — a man whose whole profession is decisive intervention — spends the picture unable to do the one thing the genre promises he'll do. He perceives Petulia's terror. He perceives her bruises. And he retreats. She returns to her abuser. The screen keeps offering situations that demand an act, and the act never comes.

When action drains out of a character, Deleuze says, something else floods in: he becomes a seer rather than an agent. The technical term is the opsign — a pure optical situation, an image you can only look at because there is nothing to be done with it. Watch how often Roeg's camera catches Scott mid-thought, off-balance, a reaction captured in fragment. He isn't building toward a choice. He's enduring what he sees. Archie is the film's eyes, and the film has handed him a world he can register but not repair.

That world is the second thing to notice, because Lester builds it out of what Deleuze called any-space-whatever — spaces that have stopped functioning as settings for action and become pure affective fragments. San Francisco here is charity galas, hospital corridors, a shopping mall, a Hilton ballroom, an RV lot. Roeg's long telephoto lenses flatten the depth out of these places so the actors seem pasted in front of a billboard or a marching band rather than standing in a room. Intimacy keeps happening in front of brand signage, walled off by negative space at the edge of the anamorphic frame. The disconnection is the point. These aren't places you can act inside; they're places that happen to you. The film inherits this directly from Antonioni's drained piazzas and from Blow-Up, shot the year before, where Di Palma used the same flattening telephoto to turn London into decorative surface. Beauty becomes the indictment.

Then there's the editing, which is where Petulia gets genuinely radical and where Deleuze's later vocabulary earns its keep. The narrative refuses linear time. A violent act — David beating Petulia — is revealed incrementally across the whole film, each glimpse recurring with shifted framing rather than fresh information. This is not flashback in the old sense, the tidy dated insert that explains a motive. Deleuze would call these sheets of past: the past as an order you move through, not a room you visit. And the way each return composes the scene only to replace it with another version of itself is what he named crystalline description — an image that dissolves its own object instead of confirming it. You never get the cathartic, fully-staged scene of confrontation. The violence stays unassimilable, exactly as trauma is. Lester and Roeg lifted this whole grammar from Resnais — Hiroshima mon amour's intrusive memory-fragments, Marienbad's refusal to verify whether a scene is memory, fantasy, or rerun — and did something almost no one had dared: they smuggled it into a Warner Bros. studio romance with movie stars.

Hold the two regimes together and you see why the film feels the way it feels. The cold modernist Danner house, all glass and display and nothing livable, is a small crystal-image — a world so polished it only reflects, a marriage in which everything is visible and nothing can be touched. Archie keeps trying to live in the old action-cinema, where a good man rescues the girl. The film keeps answering in the new time-cinema, where you watch, and time passes, and the situation does not resolve because it cannot.

That is what makes Petulia a hinge. It sits in 1968 alongside The Graduate and just ahead of Five Easy Pieces and Medium Cool, in that brief window when American film stopped believing its own sensory-motor contract and didn't yet know what would replace it. Point Blank was doing the same trick with the gangster picture the same year. What Lester proved — using a tuba, a surgeon who cannot cut, and a love that has nowhere to go — is that the most devastating thing a movie can withhold is the act it has trained you to expect. Watch it again for the gestures that go nowhere. They're the film thinking.