Vincente Minnelli (1976)

Watching A Matter of Time was saddening in more ways than one.  It’s Vincente Minnelli’s last movie; it was notoriously hacked about by the studio that made it (American International Pictures); and what may have been the visual glories of the original, which was photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth, were obscured by the muzzy print that was the best the BFI could find.  Booking for this rarely seen movie was mysteriously problematic – perhaps the film was temporarily removed from the online booking system because of difficulties getting hold of a watchable print.  (It was described as ‘fragile’ in the careless pre-screening apology by Fraser McLean, who seemed more anxious that we knew his name than about the film – plain to see who his mentor is among the BFI’s front of house team.)   Saddest of all is that, while it’s hardly surprising that Minnelli wanted to make a film that was a vehicle for his daughter, this labour of love – given the story and the type of performer Liza Minnelli is – was almost bound to be a failure.  Her filmography on Wikipedia includes twenty-five items – starting with her uncredited appearance as an infant, with her mother, in In the Good Old Summertime in 1949.   In ten of the films in the list Minnelli appears as ‘Herself’ and the truth is that she appears as the same character, who we think of as herself, in many more.  She hasn’t had a big film role in more than thirty years (and that’s counting her role in Arthur (1981) as big).   Liza Minnelli tends to do too much on screen and she’s such a strong presence that it’s next to impossible for her to play a character who might pass through this world unnoticed.  This works perfectly in Cabaret.  As Sally Bowles eventually admits:

‘I’m self-centered, inconsiderate, and what was the third adjective? Oh, yes, and I have this infantile fantasy that one day I’ll amount to something as an actress.’

Sally’s charisma – her dazzling numbers on stage at the Kit Kat Klub and her behaviour in her life away from the footlights – is her self-image, her fantasy.  But in A Matter of Time, as Nina, a nineteen year old Italian country girl who comes to Rome to work as a hotel chambermaid, Minnelli is meant to be unpretentious, invigorated by new experiences in the metropolis however modest these might be.  Her personality makes a nonsense of the conception.  In a supposedly climactic scene, Nina, who’s been spotted by a big time film director, does a screen test.  The sequence is meaningless:   Minnelli is so intuitively, intensely aware of the camera all the time there’s no way that she can suggest a different quality being transmitted at this particular moment.   Nina’s rise to international screen stardom is meant to be amazing but Liza Minnelli is irrefutably a star from the start.  The world’s recognition of Nina is only, and more than anything else in the movie, a matter of time.

Minnelli’s intensity in the role may well be sincere but it’s mostly excruciating.  The only times when her hyperbolic enthusiasm isn’t a pain are in her scenes with Ingrid Bergman, which may say something about her respect for the older star (and much more versatile actress) or may be a consequence of Bergman’s own magic.  The fearfully ageing, increasingly gaga Countess Sanziani – living in a daze of memories and delusions, of old lovers and friends dead or disappeared – is a cliche but Bergman’s effortless vocal depth and power and the passion that she gives to the role transcend the cliche.   There’s meant to be some kind of spiritual kinship between the contessa and the chambermaid:  the old woman dresses up the young one in some of the clothes she used to wear and Nina starts to fantasise about living the countess’s past in opulent, glamorous settings (Liza Minnelli is somewhat better in these sequences, for obvious reasons).  Vincente Minnelli emphasises the connection between the two women through Bergman’s heavy kohl eye make-up.  She looks to be the panda-eyed Minnelli’s grandmother rather than fairy godmother but Bergman is too compelling to avert your eyes from.   Charles Boyer features briefly as Countess Sanziani’s ex-husband – the fact that this was his last screen appearance brings another note of melancholy to the proceedings.

In her screen debut (as a nun at the dying contessa’s bedside), Bergman’s daughter Isabella Rossellini makes a stronger impression than anyone other than Minnelli, Bergman and Boyer.  It may well be that no one else is up to much (although the cast includes Fernando Rey) but the English dubbing of the voices is so bad that you can hardly blame the actors.   The chopped-up film is a terrible, arrhythmic mess; the impersonality of bits of Roman travelogue that the studio clumsily inserted destroys any mood there might have been in what Minnelli originally shot and cut.  The title song written by John Kander and Fred Ebb is very far from their best; the other music by Nino Olivierio is one of those scores that seem to carry on regardless of what’s on the screen.  The screenplay by John Gay is adapted from a 1954 novel by Maurice Druon called La Volupté d’être.  The script includes dubious insights like ‘People only die because we stop caring about them’ and ‘Be yourself – because life worships an original’.

29 May 2012