An Old Man's Daydreams

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is a very foolish, fond old movie. Written by an aging Graham Greene and directed by an aged George Kukor, it is altogether an old man's work--an embrace of a glamorous era long dead, a last grand grinning caper through it. Whether it lays claims to any purpose beyond sheer diversion is a mystery, and Greene's novel lacks a clue.

Travels With My Aunt is the story of Henry (Alec McGowen), a forty-year-old virgin and the most bankclerky of Englishmen, and his seventy-year-old Aunt Augusta (Maggie Smith), as promiscuous and unconventional as Henry is straightlaced. She sweeps him out of his dreary English garden away on a precarious flirtation with the underworld.

Cukor fabricates stock character types and conventional plot complications with playful expertise. Henry, the stodgy middle-class bourgeois, Augusta, the eccentric aunt, Visconti, her wildly romantic macho first love, and her present lover, Wordsworth, a fortune-telling black African, wind up on a mock spy adventure on the Orient Express as Augusta delivers an illegal $100,000 ransom to Visconti held captive in Africa. Fortified by the belief that love conquers all. Aunt Augusta cajoles, lies, steals, blackmails, and is deported in the course of her mission. Having sacrificed practically all she own when she finally does deliver the ransom, she collapses hysterically in her aged lover's arms, only to find that he has duped her. The ransom was a profiteering hoax, and he leaves her stranded on the African shore.

Aunt Augusta chases after the dream of her youth and finds it seedless. Hers is a persistent past, and she dwells in reminiscence. She drapes herself in shoulder furs and slinky sequined gowns, and mannerizes the carefree '20s with every flourish of her cigarette holder. Her figure has the lines of Beardsley, and her history mimics the twists of those lines. Her life was all amour--she cavorted at their serenades, whirled waltzing in their arms, and made indulgent love to them. And when they abandoned her, she resurfaced like an invincible Molly Brown.

CUKOR FILMS THE HEYDAY she remembers as an advertisement for the gay life. She lived on champagne in Grant Hotels with vast baroque rooms, and parlors caressed by generations of gamblers. Life was a spirited courtship of romance itself, all style and peacockery, quick passion and gondolas.

Aunt Augusta crowds the apartment she shares with Wordsworth with souvenirs of her continental high life, but they give it only a faded ratty elegance. Her dresser-gleams with mirrors, powder jars and pin bowls; glass ornaments flash ever-where--curlicue knicknacks, gold cherubs, and a chandelier like an overturned wedding cake, are cheap reminders of now hollow dreams. For at seventy, she is unmarried, childless, and penniless, and the mauve colored gauze through which she views her world cannot protect her from it.

Not quite an ode to romanticism, Travels With My Aunt is more an elegy to its passing. The romantic Cukor has turned capricious skeptic, and sentiment becomes a gambol. The loops of his freewheeling narrative dip eagerly into the past and circle back a bit crestfallen. And in between, cherished romance turns sappy to the taste and drippy to the nth degree. Cukor has dished out sentiment in order to bid it fond farewell.

Whimsical, quirky, sensuous Aunt Augusta is Henry's last chance at life. For he has risked nothing, suffered nothing, lost loved, given nothing, dreamed nothing. Travelling, both to Istanbul and into Aunt Augusta's past, is Henry's initiation into life. As this provincial survives one mindblower after another, stiff primness relaxes into tolerance. Augusta tells him that his legal mother was in fact a virgin, Wordsworth substitutes that woman's ashes with cannabis, he is accosted by whores in a sleazy Paris nightclub while a stripper twirls platinum coated nipples in the spotlights. Aunt Augusta is Henry's wicked fairy--in the beginning a brazen hussy, in the end a worn out bronze he has come to love.

Cukor is proselytizing for the style of the good old days but he knows full well its illusions. He only half-heartedly retreats into a past he cannot believe in. As his camera traipses gaily through the scenes of Aunt Augusta's youth, lighting it in rich rose colors and tuning it to a soundtrack of syrupy violins, he risks distending what should be entertainment into statement.

OVERFOND OF THE PAST, he brings confused eyes to the present, and he stretches the contrast between to ludicrous dimensions. On the Orient Express Henry smokes dope with a wealthy blue-jeaned backpacking American girl. Her father is in the CIA, her boyfriend a pop artist, and she can talk of nothing but the fact that her period is late and whom among her countless bedmates could the culprit be? Then Henry sleeps with her. The girl is a modern version of Aunt Augusta stripped of the illusions. She faces facts with the same irresponsible gaiety in which Aunt Augusta cloaked her dreams. It is a bare-faced present, made out to have all the substance of the past with none of its style.

Cukor is caught between, unsure of which way to turn, so her compromises and gives a consciously corny edge to his romanticism. His irony saves his nostalgia from sickening. He pleads sympathy for bankrupt dreams on the condition that those dreams are not indulged. Travels With My Aunt is simply a sketchbook movie of daydreams gone aglimmering.