Beguiled by Her Depth

Early in “Afterglow,” Julie Christie, playing a melancholy ex-B-movie actress (Norma Desmond meets Mrs. Robinson), sardonically suggests that her soul needs an overhaul. It’s not only a defining moment for this character but a culmination for Christie--who’s made a career playing lonely girls and women who just wanna have fun and are clueless when it’s over.

The only difference is that Christie is no B-movie actress. Far from it. Originally at the vanguard of ‘60s and ‘70s cinema--when turbulence turned to alienation--she worked with such notable directors as John Schlesinger, David Lean, Richard Lester, Robert Altman, Joseph Losey, Nicolas Roeg and Hal Ashby. Now she has proven her significance once again with her latest role, finally realizing how to attain lasting love in the ‘90s.

Beautiful and beguiling, exuberant and enigmatic, willful and rueful, Christie has portrayed some of the best and most complex females onscreen over the past 35 years. So, after “Afterglow” secured her third Academy Award nomination, it’s only fitting that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art chose to honor the 56-year-old English actress with a monthlong retrospective, “Looking at Julie Christie,” beginning Friday through March 21.

In looking at Christie’s films through an inevitable maze of flashbacks, flash-forwards and revolutions (political as well as social), one immediately sees the confusion she’s embodied. The cynical smile and longing in her eyes are only the beginning. Men are seduced as much by her uncertainty as by her physicality. No wonder she’s been captured so often in nonlinear fashion. Life is nonlinear, so why not film?

Christie’s stardom started with “Darling,” of course, in 1965 as a selfish fashion model during London’s swinging era. Her provocative performance in which she attains fame while losing everything else earned her an auspicious Oscar. But, in true Christie fashion, the series doesn’t start with “Darling” (which screens March 20). Instead, it kicks off Friday with another Schlesinger gem, “Far From the Madding Crowd.”

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It’s remarkable how many period pieces Christie has made, considering how modern she looks and behaves. Yet that’s precisely the point: She’s perfect for playing women ahead of their time. As farm owner Bathsheba, Christie bewitches three very different men (Alan Bates, Peter Finch and Terence Stamp) in “Far From the Madding Crowd,” a 1967 adaptation of the Thomas Hardy Victorian classic.

“A woman like you does more damage than she can conceivably imagine,” Stamp proclaims. However, unlike “Darling,” in which she’s ultimately rejected by the one man who truly loves her, Christie isn’t condemned to solitude for her selfishness and disillusionment. Bates, the patient farmer and handyman, proposes a lifetime of companionship one last time--a compromise Christie accepts here and elsewhere.

But never more bittersweetly than in “Shampoo,” one of the most incisive films of the ‘70s (screening Saturday). Beverly Hills sexual promiscuity comes to a crashing resolution on the eve of Nixon’s ’68 presidential victory, with pensive Christie rejecting emotionally vacant Warren Beatty (her real-life lover at the time) in favor of Jack Warden’s more comforting and stable marriage proposal. In a fascinating reversal from “Darling,” she leaves her true love stranded when he needs her the most.

Christie, though, doesn’t fare too well in marriage--modern or otherwise. In “Petulia” (screening March 21), actually made in ‘68, she’s at her kookiest as a free-spirited and abused housewife pursuing George C. Scott’s burned-out physician in psychedelic San Francisco. Although it’s the middle-aged moralist who’s rejuvenated by her sexy spontaneity, Christie can’t quite make the radical leap with him and surrenders to conventional boredom.

In the occult thriller “Don’t Look Now” (screening Saturday), the disconnect between Christie and Donald Sutherland is already severe before their daughter accidentally drowns. The discovery, however, of psychic contact with the deceased child liberates Christie from her spiritual funk but curses the ill-fated Sutherland to unavoidable doom because he disbelieves his own psychic powers. Even their erotic lovemaking has a coldly disjointed quality that distorts reality and shatters any hope of shared happiness. (No one photographed Christie more intriguingly than Roeg, who was the director of photography on both “Far From the Madding Crowd” and “Petulia,” as well as the director of “Don’t Look Now.”)

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A curse is also at the center of “The Go Between” (screening March 13), in which “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” While an aristocratic Christie manipulates an adolescent admirer into aiding her secret trysts with farmer Alan Bates, the resulting scandal curses all three of them. But none more prominently than the boy, who is compelled to help her break the curse more than 50 years later. Love’s obstacle here is class conflict rather than vanity--though Christie has never appeared so chilly. In any event, the sins of the past have a way of haunting the future as well.

What Lean rightly retains in his and Robert Bolt’s adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” (screening March 14) is history’s obliteration of love and how one poet recaptured it for eternity. And Christie serves as the inspiration, with four men (Omar Sharif, Rod Steiger, Tom Courtenay and Alec Guinness) falling in love with her.

“Pretty creatures do ugly things to people,” Steiger proclaims. They also do beautiful things, which Christie reveals with her presence and tenderness. It’s the stuff of prose and balalaikas, but happiness for her is fleeting once again.

Love, meanwhile, is most elusive for Christie in “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (screening March 21). Her opium-smoking frontier madam finds emotional commitment impossible, though she has no difficulty articulating her dream of owning a bordello in a Pacific Northwest mining town. Beatty, who’s articulate about his love for her, has the same dream but has difficulty expressing his ambitions. The telling moment when he’s in awe of how she devours her plate of eggs really defines their relationship.

It may well be her most assured performance, thanks in part to Altman. No wonder she won a second Academy Award nomination. Christie’s certainly a civilizing influence, even though her and Beatty’s dream is destroyed by evil forces. Yet these fools are too self-destructive for their own good anyway.

Which brings us back to “Afterglow,” directed by Altman disciple Alan Rudolph. In this Restoration comedy for the ‘90s, Christie discovers that there’s more to life than acting--and that love isn’t necessarily lost forever. When she has her cathartic breakdown at the end, she’s really summoning the demons from her previous films. She’s crying for all of her characters; she’s finally grown up--and we’ve grown up right along with her.