Victor/Victoria

Comment: This is clearly Blake Edward's most significant and most pleasant film. It has very little of the garishness, decadence, and sordidness that mar some of his other work, though I admire all of his cinematic projects.

I believe it would be fair to say that Victor / Victoria is about the moment at which art stops resembling life and becomes life. The hilarious cockroach scene is a beautiful instance of the traversal of the seeming / being distinction: The restaurant IS, in fact, infested with cockroaches if the patrons believe that it is. James Gardner feels duped at first---he is attracted to a man impersonating a woman, but that figure is, in fact, a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman. Later on, Gardner's character recognizes that it doesn't matter, ultimately, if Victor is naturally male or female. "Her" project is to contrive appearances of appearances---not to convince spectators that her appearance is natural, but to persuade them that her appearance is merely a convincing appearance, that her "truth" is purely phenomenal. How clever that the film alludes to Madame Butterfly! At times, the phenomenon is "realer" than any reality. "People believe what they see" - they ***want*** to be taken in by appearances and are inescapably disappointed by nudas veritas.

I think, in this regard, of Bernstein and Toddy: both characters are gay and yet also convincingly, almost natively heterosexualized. When they are wearing their "straight" masks, are they lying? Are they pretending? The film conjures up the ancient paradox of Megara: When liars say, "I am lying," are they telling the truth? A lie is not a lie if everyone believes it, including the liar him- or herself. I think of the wonderful bedside conversation between the Julie Andrews and ultra-masculine James Gardner characters: "I find it all fascinating. There are things available to me as a man that I could never have as a woman. I am emancipated... I'm my own man, so to speak."

The point, I think, is not that one appearance is a false and the other is "the truth," but that two mutually contradictory appearances can coexist simultaneously. Julie Andrews' character can switch from "Victor" to "Victoria" in the same way that some of "our" bilingual students switch from Spanish to English and then back to Spanish again. And why not? We live in, to cite one of the songs, a "crazy world / full of crazy contradictions," a world of shifting, ambiguous appearances that give life its thrill. Philosophically speaking, the film exhibits neither a pious, life-negating Platonism nor a Nietzschean celebration and aestheticization of hollow appearances. It suggests, rather, that you can shift from one phenomenal identity to another without either identity being "true" or emptily fraudulent. And why not? Humans are enormously complex creatures, and life is overwhelmingly ambiguous and complex.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

Comment: Not that funny, although there were a few decent gags here and there (the travails of the French waiter come to mind) but the rest of it is disappointing. The musical numbers didn't even do Julie Andrews' voice justice as far as I am concerned. I watched it out of curiousity but don't see myself watching it again.

Comment: The movie is very good and I love Julie Andrews and James Gadner. Very funny.

Comment: This was a very popular movie, but it really doesn't work on a number of levels. The major flaw, is that Jule Andrews just doesn't convince as playing a man, the whole crux of the story. It's not her fault, she's simply not the kind of actress who was able to transform herself enough, to take on the mannerisms, looks, movements, facial expressions, etc of a male (even a 1930's sophisticated "gay" one), although I'm sure she gave it her all. Without at least a degree of suspension of belief (as Dustin Hoffman, a very different breed of actor, succeeded in conveying in another crossdressing romantic comedy from the same year, TOOTSIE), the movie's mechanics and set pieces fall flat. The fault lies here with director Blake Edwards, who by this point had taken to casting Andrews in all of his movies (S.O.B. is a better, though certainly less popular example of their collaboration). Granted, the role would have been a tough casting choice in any era; to get a good singer, but one with honed enough physical acting skills to pull off the role; five years or so later Glenn Close (by which point she had become a star) would have been a far better choice, and today of course, CGI would probably be used to resculpt Andrews as "Victor". So if we don't believe Andrews as Victor in the first place, the musical set numbers in which we see "him" as a female impersonator really just become laborious...we're just watching Julie in some mediocre (at best) musical scenes, in close up yet; no female impersonator is that good, the concept of the impersonator is of course illusion, and Edwards and Andrews don't pull off the illusion that we the real audience is watching the screen audience believe they're watching a female singer, who then turns out to be man pretending to be a woman). The first time I saw Boy George, I thought he was a female, having had the presence and mannerisms of a female, his illusion worked, at least the first time, even if he wasn't actually doing a female impersonation act. In SOME LIKE IT HOT, a film smartly shot in black and white, Lemmon and Curtis never convince they're females (I don't think they're trying), but the comedy is broad enough, and the filmmakers create such a sense of good will and humor with the audience, that we just accept the scenario and go along for the ride. As Victor, Andrews simply looks like a woman with short hair, a man's suit, and is lowering her voice a little.

SOME LIKE IT HOT brings up two other major flaws in VICTOR/VICTORIA. Everything I tried to make a case for above could be thrown out a window if only the movie is very funny, and it's not. It's cute, it's not a bad way to spend two hours on a rainy day, but except for a few chuckles, it's just not funny. Blake Edwards tries, and you can certainly see his wheels spinning, but again, most of the jokes fall flat. Edwards tries to catch lightning in a bottle again in a running gag with a tired replay of an Inspector Clouseau type private eye; and another running gag with a waiter (Graham Stark, from Edwards' Pink Panther franchise) leads nowhere. The film finally lacks a great payoff, in fact, loses steam about two thirds of the way through, with no conflict or tension set up. It could be that after Edwards elaborately built his premise, he finally had no where to go with it (I haven't seen the early 1930's German film on which this one is based), suprising for a writer/director of his quality (and the opposite of Some Like It Hot, which has a perfect structure, conflict and resolution).

The supporting cast of Alex Karras and Lesly Ann Warren perform their tasks admirably, John Rhys-Davies is given nothing to do. James Garner is James Garner, and Robert Preston kind of steals the show, but it's really not a great, bravura character performance either (and his character becomes nearly invisible for a long stretch, until his drag number at the coda, which also doesn't work very well, either as a set piece, or in terms of storyline).

The movie was successful enough to have spawned a Broadway musical production a dozen years later, starring in turn Andrews, Liza Minnelli and Raquel Welch. But though Victor/Victoria is fondly remembered, it's not very good.

Comment: Great movie with a great cast. Not only are the main characters well portrayed, but the supporting cast is superb as well.