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| Director Vincente Minnelli |
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| Father and daughter on the set |
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| Liza Minnelli with her father, and mother, Judy Garland |
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| Ingrid Bergman with her daughters Ingrid and Isabella |
A MATTER OF TIME D+ USA (97 mi) 1976 d: Vincente Minnelli
No one dies unless we wish them to. —Contessa Sanziani (Ingrid Bergman)
Something of a train wreck of a film, a really perplexing example of a project being stolen from the director, as Samuel Z. Arkoff, head of American International Pictures, known mainly for low-budget exploitation B-movies of the 50’s and 60’s, took the final cut out of the hands of Minnelli very early in the post-production process, before the director was able to supervise the dubbing and musical scoring, both of which are utterly atrocious in the final version, while also reducing the length of the film, yet inexplicably adding a prologue and epilogue, where all that’s left are the ruined remains of what could have been. Based on the 1955 Maurice Druon novella Film of Memory, the film is loosely based on the real life exploits of the infamous Italian eccentric Marchesa Casati, with Druon striking up a relationship with her during her declining years in London while he was stationed there during World War II, becoming a staged version in 1965 with Vivian Leigh entitled La Contessa. The film went through various changes in title, starting with the book title, then Search for Beauty, then Carmella, then Nina, before finally settling on the current title, which is the name of a song that can be heard in the introduction sung by Liza Minnelli, now a fabulous film star named Nina, but the film is a flashback to when she was an impressionable hotel chambermaid and finds herself living her life through the memories of an aging Contessa (Ingrid Bergman) at the once splendid, now run-down hotel. Utterly devoted to the impoverished Contessa, who is on the verge of being evicted for nonpayment, her vivid memories serve as an inspiration for Nina to reach for a better life. Made in Italy, shot on location in Rome and Venice, mostly taking place in a single hotel, though there are fleeting shots of an entirely different world outside (mostly stock travelogue footage of Rome), which we rarely get a chance to see, with Bergman stuck in what is arguably the worst make-up job of her career, looking more like a ghoulish vampire from Transylvania. The claustrophobic confines of the Contessa’s room is where most of the film takes place, as we get caught up in the psychological mindset of a myriad of memories that intermingle with the present, often becoming indistinguishable, where Nina can be seen taking the place of the Contessa in her own memories, adding a surrealistic flourish of mixed identity that seems to accentuate and embellish the fractured aspects in the aging process. Liza grew up on the MGM sets with her father, where Hollywood stars and friendly crew members comprised her extended family and helped celebrate her birthdays, so she grew up longing to work with her father, who she describes as “the gentlest, funniest, most charming man I ever met,” but he was 73 when he made what ended up being his final picture, receiving little in the way of career honors during his lifetime. The film was badly edited, mutilated might be the better word, as Arkoff gutted the picture, described by Pauline Kael as “chopped-up shambles,” opening to terrible reviews, quickly disappearing from theaters, and never released in Britain or France. Both ended up disowning this film, signing their names to an ad taken out in the trade papers, along with 33 other directors, protesting that their vision had been violated, “The film is a reedited, revised, altered, and distorted form that has nothing to do with the original content. We are concerned here with principles and ethics. An artist must be allowed his view, and those who back him must support that view after the fact, as well as before it.” The names of support included Robert Aldrich, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich, Clarence Brown, Frank Capra, John Cassavetes, Brian De Palma, Allan Dwan, Blake Edwards, Milos Foreman, Bob Fosse, Samuel Fuller, John Hancock, Elia Kazan, Gene Kelly, Irving Lerner, George Lucas, Sidney Lumet, Alan Pakula, Arthur Penn, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir, Martin Ritt, Herbert Ross, Mark Rydell, Martin Scorsese, Joan Mickland Silver, Steven Spielberg, Billy Wilder, Gene Wilder, and Robert Wise.
A bizarre father/daughter musical with Liza Minnelli, though it’s not really a musical at all, instead Liza sings these existential songs about making something of her life, a kind of rags to riches fantasy about becoming a huge star, where the entire story is told through the vantage point of another aging star whose memories become mixed with her own, like a Proustian reflection on time and memory, at one point pleading with her, “Please don’t give up your memories… I feel like I’m a part of them now,” Liza Minnelli and Ingrid Bergman in A Matter Of Time 1976 TikTok (52 seconds). It’s incredible to believe this comes “after” CABARET (1972), shot by the same cinematographer, Geoffrey Unsworth, yet doesn’t have the look of any other Minnelli film, as this is a misfire on all cylinders, jinxed by labor strikes, which extended the length of the shoot, expanded from fourteen weeks to twenty, yet there’s something essentially captivating about the fact it was made at all, as it obviously had meaning for the people involved, including Ingrid Bergman and her daughter Isabella Rossellini making her first film appearance in just a bit part at the end, much more captivating in the barely seen Taviani brother’s movie IL PRATO (The Meadow) (1979), which is genuinely affecting, another film about realizing, with a sense of urgency, just how important it is to be alive. While this is also the only time Ingrid Bergman and her daughter worked together, it is also the final film of Charles Boyer, who was in an extraordinary amount of pain for his brief appearance as the Contessa’s long estranged husband of forty years, Count Sanziani. The shoot in Italy came at the height of a series of high-profile kidnappings known as the Years of Lead (Italy), including the kidnapping and killing of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978, and several threats were made against Liza Minnelli, but she kept this information from her father and simply increased her personal security team. It was also the first time Ingrid Bergman returned to Italy for a film since making films together with Roberto Rossellini in the early 50’s (3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman). While the film has a Cinderella-like structure and fairy tale ending, Liza’s singing style resembles her mother, emphasizing the lyrics through dramatic pauses, “Fairy tales can come true…Into each life a magic moment comes,” the chambermaid Nina is actually discovered by a film director staying at the same hotel, Antonio Vicari, played by Gabriele Ferzetti, the star of Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960), who is roundly criticized by the thoroughly incensed room service maid after spontaneously pouncing on her while he’s busily attempting to construct a grand rape scene for his movie finale, which is causing him no end of frustrations, Watch “A Matter of Time” | The Front Row | The New Yorker YouTube (4:58). But the storyline goes through the Countess, where her world unravels through a kind of memory time traveling, loaded with chaotic flashbacks and fantasies, living in the upper crust of society, where she is literally worshipped wherever she goes, usually in the company of fabulously wealthy men, as she’s wined and dined and swept through a world of casinos and châteaus, staying in only the finest hotels of Europe where she’s catered to like royalty, yet this world only exists in her mind, consumed by the passions of her past, where her entire raison d’être is to feel alive. Years ago, the Contessa left her husband for another man, still fixated on this long gone affair, one of many treatments of adultery in Minnelli films, like a Madame Bovary obsession, showing the huge costs, as not only did it wreck the Contessa’s marriage, but it may have driven her to live in the past.
Nina is drawn into this cobwebbed imagination, fixated on her experiences, utterly spellbound by the seductive detail of her recollections, as she gradually begins to imagine herself inhabiting the Contessa’s past, often placing herself in the luxurious position of the Countess. This structure actually resembles the previous Minnelli film, ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER (1970), where a woman’s memories are recreated under a hypnotic state by her treating psychiatrist, causing the doctor to fall in love, not with the woman he’s treating, but the woman she used to be, becoming increasingly interested in taking possession of her past. A lamentable costume drama, the horrible dubbing and intrusive aspect of oversaturated music makes it difficult to take any of this seriously, confounded by its lack of narrative cohesion, as some of the dialogue seems to refer back to things we never see, while long minutes of screen time are eaten up with rambling subplots that go nowhere. Heavily overstylized and at times unhinged, with exaggerated theatrics veering into camp, the look of the film makes it seem like it was filmed in a cave, as the colors are dull instead of vibrant, where the passage of time has not done this film any favors, as it’s only lost more of its luster. The subject of aging and death are a central premise of the film, as the Contessa is an eccentric woman completely out of touch with the contemporary world, like The Madwoman of Chaillot, or Gloria Swanson’s aging Norma Desmond in SUNSET BLVD. (1950), finding herself detached from reality, verging on madness, where it’s hard not to connect this to the director’s own lingering obsessions. In Mark Griffin’s biography of Vincente Minnelli, A Hundred or More Hidden Things, Liza’s half-sister Lorna Luft recalls that Minnelli was already in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The postproduction problems only accentuate this element of disillusionment, as the film itself suffers from its own fractured existence. Yet what Nina sees is someone who served as a muse for artists, and a source of inspiration for great minds, asking for little in return except to live her life free of tedium and banalities. In lucid moments, she views Nina as her apprentice, offering teachable moments, as she hands out good advice, such as “be yourself—the world worships an original,” as nobody wants a copy, yet at the same time she is shown training Nina how to get jewelry from boyfriends. What she’s really doing is transferring the largesse of her life into Nina’s suffocating existence, breathing new life into her, as if resuscitating her lost dreams, Liza Minnelli - The Me I Haven't Met Yet (VERY RARE SONG!) YouTube (2: 45). Of course, as the opening song suggests, it only takes a moment, and that supposedly innocuous coincidence occurs without explanation, it just happens, and everything changes afterwards. While lingering on issues of death, what this film really wants to convey is the essential nature of new beginnings, perhaps with the belief that the director’s films would live on in future generations, as if passing the torch, using his own daughter to emphasize how this works, as her film character is completely transformed overnight into a major star, which is how it often happens. There is only one staggering sequence in this film, a memorable moment of Liza singing a smoky, jazz-tinged rendition of George Gershwin’s Do It Again, Liza Minnelli sings Do It Again YouTube (3:31), which is oddly fascinating, one of her mother’s most exquisite songs, but done quite differently, Judy Garland ' Do It Again' - YouTube (4:44), exquisitely shot in the opulence of Venice’s Palazzo Ca’ Rezzonico, like something right out of CABARET, literally pulsing with life and reverberating with an intoxicated feeling.
