Review: The Other Side Of The Wind

Image courtesy of Netflix.

Bringing Orson Welles' final film, "The Other Side of the Wind," to the screen was a herculean task that has taken 48 years to complete. Although not nearly as difficult, reviewing the film in an adequate manner presents its own challenges.

In his final picture - which he shot between 1970 and 1976, only to languish in various locales around the world before being assembled and edited together, thanks to Netflix, Frank Marshall and various others - Welles appears to be taking a page from Jean Luc Godard's book. There is a Godardian quote at one point in the picture when a character poses the question, "Is the camera eye a reflection of reality or is reality a reflection of the camera eye?" Much like Godard's later work, Welles appears disinterested in telling a linear narrative story here, and the picture often feels as if he is, as the British might say, "taking the piss."

This is not to say that "The Other Side of the Wind" is anything less than beguiling. And maddening. The film kicks off with a voiceover by director Peter Bogdanovich, who notes that the proceedings are set on the 70th birthday of Jake Hannaford (played here acerbically by legendary filmmaker John Huston, whose character might be a stand-in for Welles), who is in the process of putting together a film that has left his collaborators and studio bosses scratching their heads. We first meet him as he wraps up filming a decadent nudie scene.

Bogdanovich - who plays Hannaford's protege and right-hand man - is among the many classic Hollywood figures who pop up in small roles in the picture. Others include Huston, Dennis Hopper, Susan Strasberg, Mercedes McCambridge, Henry Jaglom, Claude Chabrol, Edmond O'Brien, Paul Stewart and Paul Mazursky. Hannaford's birthday party is populated by friends, well wishers, enemies, critics, studio heads, groupies, academics, spies and journalists chronicling the director's life. But Hannaford's intention is to brush them off, occasionally shock them and, during one scene, get physically violent. At one point, he gets bored and begins firing a rifle at some mannequins during his party.

These scenes - most of which are in black and white and have a jarring handheld, cinema verite style - are intercut with sequences from Hannaford's movie, which appears to be some sort of parody of Antonioni's late 1960s, early 1970s output, namely "Zabriskie Point." In that film, a mostly nude Native American woman (played mostly silently by Croatia's Oja Kodar, Welles' paramour at the time and the film's co-writer) stalks a young man on a motorcycle (Robert Random), who eventually walks off Hannaford's set after being forced to engage in a peculiar sex scene involving a pair of scissors.

While the party scenes give off a caustic vibe, the scenes from Hannaford's film are purposefully ludicrous and visually stunning. There's a dreamlike, near out-of-body sequence involving two people having sex in a moving car during a rainstorm that is preceded by a trippy, psychedelic sequence at a rock 'n' roll venue. And there's another gorgeously shot scene in which Kodar walks in slow motion through a bathroom as the people hiding behind the stalls observe her.

But while the film fixates - some might argue to an uncomfortable degree - on the naked female form, it does so to the point of parody, and Welles' film feels like a strangely timely take on toxic masculinity in Hollywood. The film is, at times, exhilarating, tedious, visually stunning, chaotic and bursting with ideas.

It's also not an easy sit - and certainly deserves a second viewing at some point - and one that I would not rank among Welles' best ("Citizen Kane," "The Magnificent Ambersons" and "Touch of Evil"), although such comparisons are unfair. Welles is one of cinema's greatest pioneers and this oddball artifact, which has thankfully been saved from obscurity, is a fascinating coda to his career. Film enthusiasts won't want to miss it for the world.