The World Of Henry Orient

I rented this delightful film after seeing it on The Onion's Sixteen Films That May Have Influenced Wes [Anderson's] Style list. I felt somewhat smug in being able to boast having seen a couple more than the person here!

Needless to say I hadn't seen all of them, and this was the first one to peak my interest. Made in 1964 it seems to anticipate a lot of the social change that was just around the corner, but whilst being wholeheartedly NOT a film with a message. It's a light, comic film (it stars Peter Sellers after all) about adolescent crushes.

Two girls at a prestigious New York school fall in love with Sellers' hilarious avant-garde composer (who needs prompting by his lugubrious conductor for the next note) and begin to compose an imaginary love affair, complete with love letters and trips to foreign locations. Punning on his name, they sit outside his apartment with Chinese hats on and bow, hands clasped every time they catch sight of him. Orient is seriously perturbed by these pesky kids because he is in the process of trying to entice an extremely nervous married woman into his apartment for all sorts of shenanigans. (It will not spoil the film to say that when he does finally get her inside, it produces a very funny scene).

What struck me about this film was its streak of progressive social politics. The sad, dreamy Gil lives with her divorced mother and her "old friend" and fellow divorcee. All three bond with Gil's impulsive (and quite possibly unhinged) new friend Val over their shared experiences of psychiatrists. It boasts an understanding of adolescent love and female friendship very few films made today exhibit, a tolerance of pre-pubescent imaginary love affairs as the harmless playacting they are and a realisation of their importance in maturity: Gil's mother and friend get quite teary remembering their own first crushes, and Gil's mother notes drily "now the real trouble starts" before a cut to the girls a couple of years later applying makeup and talking about boys at school.

The performances of the two newcomers Tippy Walker as Val and Merrie Spaeth's Gil are superbly natural, wonderfully ignorant of the camera. They are not the children so often seen in movies, pale, over-sentimentalised, exagerrated versions. Their friendship blossoms before your very eyes and the sadness that underpins their relationship perfectly judged: never over-bearing but always in your mind. Sellers' performance is as always entirely manic, yet wholly hilarious.

And in case you were wondering, it is SO Wes Anderson. Beautiful photography (New York in the crisp, clear sunlight of an autumn day), adrift young offspring of rich families, an undercurrent of sadness and broken homes, eccentric adults. This really is a wonderful film.