Une histoire immortelle

Welles continues to amaze me. I've made an effort to track down some of his less available movies, such as F For Fake, and this one. This is closer in style to the Magnificent Ambersons than anything else I've seen. Welles seems to have a love for the people of this world he creates and frames them in vibrant colors with golden lighting. The pace, unlike the majority of his works, is slow and deliberate without the trademarked quick editing. The story, too, is not rushed and the ironic twists are revealed with a sense of sadness, no one's "comeuppance" seemed justified but rather a tragic outcome of each character's personal flaws. I really recommend this for fans of the master. I think many will find this odd and I imagine that many younger viewers (the ones who find black & white dull or Hitchcock overrated) will find this unwatchable.

Orson Welles directs based on a novel by Isak Dinesen a story about an Ebenezer Scrooge type, the miserly rich old man who doesn't believe in stories and prophecies, who hears a story about a sailor picked up by an old man in a harbor to sleep with a beautiful woman and decides to make the story happen in real life, "so that at least one sailor can tell it from beginning to end, like it happened". This is like an essay on fiction, or like a charcoal sketch, except the charcoal in Welles' hand leaves smudges and we get those smudges as handprints on the canvas because The Immortal Story seems to talk about the anxieties of a storyteller and a magician but also of an aging man and an exile. In parts of the static, dour, style, he channels Bergman, old Dreyer, Beckett, his own work, there's a beautiful piano accompaniment and Jeanne Moreau, in her Pierre Cardin attires, looks ravished and ravishing at the same time. In the end the story is reenacted for the old man's benefit and to his satisfaction, but the sailor leaving the mansion refuses to tell it to anyone because who would believe him anyway. Perhaps Welles is telling us that some things, the important ones in life, we tell as stories because no one would believe us otherwise, so that in the world of imagination they can become as real and so communicate their truth, and inversely that perhaps all stories in the world happened somewhere to someone in some form, and we only hear their echo through the centuries. Or even that we're all as characters in a story, moving at the bidding of a higher authority that pulls the strings, but it's our right and choice to tell our story or not. Food for thought.

I just saw The Immortal story for the first time today thanks to TCM. I was impressed by the otherworldly quality of the film. Reading through the IMDb reviews I was surprised that no one speculated as to why Wells chose this story. To me the answer seems obvious. The film is about a lonely old man who wants to bring a story he has heard to life. He knows that he cannot accomplish the task alone so he turns to a minion in his employ to arrange the set piece and hire the players. Ironically even when he succeeds, it becomes clear that no one will ever hear the recounting of the story.

This is how Wells probably viewed his own life. ​Throughout his film career he struggled unhappily with his dependence on the help of producers and his need to control actors in order to bring his artistic visions to life. Sadly, even on the few occasions when he successfully got films completed, to him it seemed as if he never really had an audience.

The more I watch this movie, the more I love it. It's a gift of a genius who proves how easily Literature and Cinema can be mixed in a powerful way. Although is short and barely commercial, is a gem, a masterpiece of colour, rythm, music and words. The lasts shots, are simply magic.

A number of people who have reviewed this here have watched this film over and over, but I think once has proved enough for me. While it is only an hour, it moves slowly, and while there is an appealing oddness to the proceedings, I was never caught up in it. The basic idea is intriguing (less so if you read the reviews here, many of which give away more than they should) and Moreau is quite affecting, but I find the glowing comments of other viewers downright peculiar.

To me, this feels like an adaptation of a story (by Isaac Dineson) that would probably be better read. A tremendous amount of voice-over commentary and soliloquies are threaded through, and my feeling is if you need this many words to tell a story, it is probably not a good film story.

Like everything by Welles, it is worth watching. While it feels cheaply made, it still exhibits his sense of composition and his unique sensibility. But ultimately it's not especially good (at least based on one viewing) and certainly far from Welles' great works.