Even as a major Blake Edwards enthusiast, I’d always been a
bit cool on
Victor Victoria, held back in large part by Julie Andrews’
inadequacy in the main role (of course her implausibility is part of the
artifice, but even so, the lack of any real charged sexual ambiguity remains a
drawback). On a most recent viewing though, I found myself becoming rather
blissfully entangled in the film’s counterpointing of performance and
projection, reflecting that it may be about looking more than being seen. Take
most obviously the final scene, in which Victoria (having discarded her Victor
persona) reclaims and validates her relationship with James Garner’s King
Marchand simply by sitting passively beside him in the audience, to watch Toddy
(the priceless Robert Preston) ham his way through one of Victor’s signature
routines. Most of the scenes between Andrews and Garner consist of one
watching the other, or trying to figure out the other, or else of the two
discussing the ambiguities of their relationship: the movie hardly conveys what
that relationship might look like in fully achieved form (of course, that’s a
staple of the mismatched relationship genre, but here it’s not so much - as the
phrase goes - a bug as a feature). The filming of Victor’s musical numbers tends
to emphasize their unknowable otherness: consider in contrast the much more easily titillating number performed by Lesley Ann Warren’s more
straightforwardly defined character, with its very different depiction of the
audience. The emphasis on observation isn’t confined to the stage: the film is
a near-network of spying and surveillance (including the late introduction of a
Clouseau-type character), all rooted in definitional confusion (at a key point
of confusion, Marchand finds clarity by going to a dive bar and picking a fight
so he can get beaten up). Even now, much of the film seems to me to play more
flatly than it might ideally have done, but the intricacy of Edwards’ thematic
and visual schemes only becomes more impressive.
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