Wonderwall / Reflections On Love

     Is the lame George Harrison music, from his Ravi Shankar period, the supposed hook? Or the psychedelic art direction: animated amoeba and butterflies, the faux Peter Max scenery? Or young Jane Birkin, several years after impressing as a get-naked teen groupie in Blow Up, as the nubile object of desire? It's a hard day's night trying to figure out the appeal, either then or now, of this clueless, almost plotless 1969 movie. The pinch of story: a fuzzy-haired, absent-minded scientist (Jack MacGowren) gets distracted from his life at the microscope when he discovers a peephole in his wall at home leading to an LSD world. In this trippy alternative universe, gap-toothed Jane, a pouty siren-in-residence, lounges about, occasionally making Kama Sutra love to her Valentino-like bloke. The scientist keeps peeping, and so does the audience. The grapplings we watch are pretty chaste and boring, and that's practically the whole silly movie. The director, Joe Massot, is represented additionally by an accompanying 1965 short, Reflections On Love, which has random Cinemascope shots of contemporary Londoners culminating in a marriage. The bride is the lovely "dollybird," Jenny Boyd, sister of George Harrison's wife, Patti Boyd.

GERALD PEARY
(October, 2000)

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