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Jean Seberg lures Warren Beatty and Peter Fonda into a psychologically dangerous web in Lilith |
Director: Robert Rossen
Cast: Warren Beatty (Vincent Bruce), Jean Seberg (Lilith
Arthur), Peter Fonda (Stephen Evshevsky), Kim Hunter (Dr Bea Brice), Anne
Meacham (Mrs Meaghan), Jessica Walter (Laura), Gene Hackman (Norman), James
Patterson (De Lavrier), Robert Reilly (Bob Clayfield)
Movies have long had a fascination with mental illness – in
particular the impact of mental illness on women. Lilith is an intriguing, elliptical, somewhat cold but intriguing
film that looks at the impact isolation, loneliness and seclusion can have on
people and how these damaged psyches can sprawl out and cause further pain and
suffering for others. However, it’s also a difficult, unclear and occasionally
hard to like film, that deliberately clouds so many of its points in a veil of
doubt and uncertainty that it’s difficult to really embrace it.
Returning from an undisclosed war (possibly Korea), Vincent
Bruce (Warren Beatty), a lonely, slightly troubled young man, drifts into a job
as a counsellor at a private mental hospital, under the supervision of Dr Brice
(Kim Hunter). Bruce is empathetic and keen to understand and help the patients,
but he finds himself slowly drawn towards Lilith Arthur (Jean Seberg), a
sensual and seductive patient at the institute. Encouraged to spend more time
with Lilith – as only Vincent seems able to draw her out of a fantasy world to
engage with the real one – he increasingly finds himself infatuated with her,
increasingly bending any personal or professional ethics to fuel his emotional
and sexual need for her.
Just in case you are in any doubt from reading that, it’s
pretty clear from early on in the film that the real person in need of help is
Vincent. Played with a methody introspection and brooding insecurity by Beatty
(he impassively and wordlessly drifts through several scenes or merely watches,
and only rarely shows any emotional engagement), Vincent is frequently framed
by Rossen alone, lost in the centre and sides of frames, or walking seemingly
aimlessly forward. The camera often drifts towards him, if only to stress his
lack of real engagement with the things he is seeing in front of him. His
obsessive qualities are there from the very start, with his fixations switching
between his mother, a former girlfriend (played with a flirtatious
seductiveness by Jessica Walter) and finally settling, overwhelmingly, on
Lilith whom he follows with the glazed eyes of a potential killer. Beatty
struggled with the part – and I can see why, as our central character is such a
distant cipher that he becomes someone very hard for the audience to invest any
interest in.
Lilith herself is an intriguing if, it seems, unknowable
character – almost impossible to tell if she is a truly destructive force or
someone who simply behaves as she feels in the moment with no understanding of
the impact her actions have. She is frequently callous and cruel, and then will
revert to sadness, vulnerability and insecurity. She looks for love – or at
least affection and loyalty – at every turn, but then also seems unable to
understand any personal relationship except through the filter of sex. Starting
the film placing an erotic spell around sensitive fellow patient Steve (Peter
Fonda, vulnerable and rather sweet) she quickly switches all her efforts to
wrapping Vincent in a web of enchantment (as the film rather clumsily stresses
to us in a scene where a doctor explicitly compares her to a spider).
Lilith is increasingly seen as an unsettling, indiscriminate
figure. No sooner does Vincent become her lover, than she begins flaunting a
sexual relationship she is having with another female patient. (Lesbianism was quite
radical for a film at the time). Even more surprisingly the patient is a staid,
rather imperious middle-aged woman (played imposingly by Anne Meacham), and the
relationship seems to be partly conducted to get a rise (of one sort or
another) out of Vincent. Earlier, Lilith flirts disturbingly and erotically
with a very young child (who seems disturbed) – although the viewer is perhaps
even more disturbed by Vincent’s blank watching of the whole scene. At every
point we are reminded of Lilith’s erotic allure – and the framing of the film,
and its beautiful photography by Eugene Schufftan helps to create this mystic
image. Lilith is often shown behind grills and bars earlier on, before she
emerges into the outside world and one enchanting image sees her kissing her
reflection in a lake, the very act reducing the reflection to shimmering
ripples on the surface: can anyone know her?
The part leans on being borderline sexist, the idea of the
enchanting, liberated woman as somehow being a dangerous (almost evil) threat
to the safety and mental security of the men around her, deliberately
endangering the decent world with her sexual openness. It largely manages to avoid
this due to the performance of Jean Seberg, who gives Lilith a vulnerability
and suggestions of deep psychological trauma that underpin her surface
sexuality, flirtation and predatory nature. It’s no surprise that she is so
completely able to overwhelm the repressed, inverted Vincent, or that he
becomes such a willing slave to her whims and spur-of-the-moment suggestions.
Much of this disintegration of Vincent underpins the second
half of the film, as he and Lilith engage in a dance that ends up having
overwhelmingly negative consequences for each of them and for many of those
around them. Intriguingly, Rossen’s vision of this mental institute as a more
bohemian organisation suggests that the staff all seem aware of (and even tacitly
encourage) the relationship – although whether this is part of a treatment or
some sort of bizarre other motive is unclear. However, all this doesn’t help to
make either character one we really care about, or make the story crystallise
into something that carries real impact.
That captures the central problem of the film – Rossen
deliberately builds the story with an elliptical sense of mystery in which the
actions and motives of characters remain deliberately unclear, and the world
they live in takes on elements of the dreamlike fantasy world that Lilith
herself sometimes lives in (complete with her own language). Events seems to
move with little sense of time. There are surreal interludes, not least an
extended sequence where Vincent takes Lilith to a jousting competition (yes you
read that right). It’s perhaps all a part of understanding how the
personalities of the two lead characters slowly collapse over time into
themselves, but it also serves to keep a distance between the film and the
viewer. The final tragic outcomes are predictable from the very start of the
film, but there is still a certain power to them. As a study of what slow
mental disintegration may look like, Lilith
is an intriguing little picture, but basically a little too hard to invest in
emotionally to carry real impact.
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