Billy Liar

The spanking new Paris Cinema, with its drunken murals of Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe, with its little attendant in gendarme costume (a la Jack Lemmon) who welcomes all with a sheepish "bon soir," with its rotund manager exuding continental pleasantries in Maurice Chevalier tones as he hustles customers to their upholstered seats, really put me in the mood for Billy Liar.

For both Billy Liar (an exploration of the caricatural fantasy life of its young hero) and this plush Boston Art Haus are variations upon the charming cliches of the capitalist imagination.

Billy's real life is crammed to the brim with that dreary banality which has become cinematically synonymous with the British middle-class. To escape the drabness of his clerkship at the local mortician's and the carpings of his parents and crotchety grandma, Billy manufactures absurd complications in his personal life. For a starter, he perpetually fabricates deceptions--apparently for the sheer adventure of extricating himself from the embarrassments which result. A neighbor inquires after his father: Billy unnecessarily invents disease and surgery. As the contradictions pile up, his lies grow more extravagant and improbable.

Next, Billy embroils himself in simultaneous engagements with two horrid girls who hold no appeal for him. Prissy Barbara, a vacuous townie whose jaw drops when he puts his hand on her knee, and Rita, a shrew with large breasts and a gelding tongue, are constantly on the point of finding Billy out. Hopping in frantic secrecy between these charmers keeps his nights occupied--but offers no more satisfaction than his job, or bumbling duplicities.

But Billy's main escape is the life of his imagination, the land of Ambrosia--a fanciful municipality which he liberates and defends. In his humdrum real world, Billy is office boy and small time wheeler dealer. In Ambrosia he is Army General and poet laureate, capitalist-magnate, dictator, and idol of millions. His face beams down on cheering throngs from billboards and placards. Everywhere he is trailed by admiring troops and adoring women. Yet Ambrosia is only the infantile country of William Steig's "Dreams of Glory." Clearly, Billy's imagination has been spoon-fed and molded from childhood by radio, telly, and newsreels: it is, alack, the imagination of his whole generation--as trite and enfeebled as the bourgeois lives around him. Chained in Alger-like dreams of limitless possibility, Billy never learns this fatal secret.

Halfway through the film, he meets Liz--the penultimate vision of Lime--that imaginary 'Cliffie you half-expect to encounter un-accompanied in the early-morning Bick. Frankly, alluringly, incredibly, she offers herself to Billy. She, too, has cherished a fantasy nether world; this is their greatest bond. They plan to flee to London, and live together in bohemian impetuousness.

Earlier we saw the fantastic as a refuge from mundane reality. Liz offers a chance for a real-life adventure! But Billy is too weak for actual escape; the lure of Ambrosia is too powerful. Kidding himself to the last, he "misses" the train which carries Liz off.

This is a wonderful film. Julie Christie, as the ever-free Liz, will fail to enrapture only the most hardened Lamont wonk, and should cause even the Peachiest of Cliffies to loosen the stays on her girdle. Tom Courtenay must be a Harvard Everyman--going through the motions on the outside, but a sexual tiger, fearless politico, and suffering hero in his omnipresent daydreams.

Scriptwriters Waterhouse and Hall, and director John Schlesinger have more than redeemed themselves after their previous collaboration, A Kind of Loving. Despite good reviews, that was a dreadful film--pretentious, hackneyed, maudlin, static--everything that Billy Liar is not. Here they move easily between fantasy and reality, in flowing, witty sequences.

Schlesinger has suggested that, for Billy, fantasy and reality merge into one tangled and confused whole. Yet the triumph of his effort lies in his failure to communicate this interpretation. Billy's imaginings form a series of outrageous cliches that protrude glaringly from the actual flow of plot. As a result, the fantasy sequences might well suggest a delightful spoof of the "81/2"--Marienbad treatment, where the inventions of the protagonist's teeming consciousness must be painstakingly divorced from what is really happening. Happily, Billy Liar makes no such intellectual demands on its audience.

For two-thirds of the movie one follows Billy's elaborate imbroglios and fanciful disentanglements in a spirit of high hilarity. (Whenever he finds himself pinched in a particularly sticky wicket he sees himself suddenly in a trooper's uniform, spattering his tormentors with submachine-gun bullets.) But finally, after his pipedream of a big-city job collapses, after the boss catches him embezzling, when Liz leaves for London without him and he faces the death of his grandmother and fury of his father we realize that the pathetic little mirage of Ambrosia is Billy's permanent residence.