Newly restored, Jim McBride’s 1969 documentary is about his lover who gets married to another man. Her story remains anything but boring.
“We waited for a movie like the one we wanted to make, and secretly wanted to live,” says one of the protagonists of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 youth film, “Masculine Feminine.” That secret desire is the pretext of “David Holzman’s Diary,” a classic of the American New Wave, made by Jim McBride in 1967, that was the original mockumentary.
McBride’s fictional “cinéma vérité” was occasionally mistaken for the real thing — not least because his 1969 follow-up, “My Girlfriend’s Wedding,” actually was a diaristic documentary. Newly restored, it is screening at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan along with its precursor and a seldom-seen sequel, “Pictures From Life’s Other Side.”
A counterculture love story cum screwball comedy, “My Girlfriend’s Wedding” is mainly a portrait of McBride’s inamorata, a young Englishwoman named Clarissa Dalrymple (nee Ainley) with whom he shares an East Village pad. McBride shoots most of the movie on the day Clarissa secures her green card by marrying someone who is not McBride (his divorce isn’t yet final). The bridegroom, whom Clarissa has only just met, is a self-identified Yippie, happy to confound the system.
Life imitates art. “My Girlfriend’s Wedding” often seems to satirize McBride’s original satire, as when, interviewing Clarissa, he directs her to hold up a mirror, thus revealing the camera that is recording her. The difference between the two movies is that, unlike David Holzman’s girlfriend, who was alienated by the filming process, Clarissa is cheerfully complicit in her objectification. She first appears wrapped in a bedcover.
Although “My Girlfriend’s Wedding” was dismissed as tedious when it opened in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973, Clarissa is anything but boring. Later becoming an influential art curator, she is less garrulous than one of Andy Warhol’s superstars or the subject of Shirley Clarke’s “Portrait of Jason.” Even so, she seems quite comfortable living the movie of her life, discussing the two children she had out of wedlock, cursing her father (and reading a letter he sent her), and obscurely ruminating on “the revolution.”
Adding an extra complication, Clarissa, who recently had an abortion, may or may not be pregnant again. She is, however, perfectly composed, appearing in a demure white minidress to be married in the Manhattan Municipal Building. After the ceremony, the newlyweds have lunch where Clarissa obsesses about being late for a new job (waiting tables at Café Figaro), as her husband questions the whole notion of work and holds forth even less coherently on revolutionary politics.
“It doesn’t seem to be a movie I’m making anymore,” McBride complains that evening. “Let’s not film.” Just when it seems that “My Girlfriend’s Wedding” might end, like “David Holzman’s Diary” with an on-camera breakdown, the movie cuts to a title: “Four Days Later We Leave for San Francisco.” What follows is a hyperkinetic road movie accompanied by Al Kooper’s strident declaration “I Can’t Quit Her.”
If not exactly a happy ending, it’s a good deal happier than the “Diary” denouement. As much as anything, “My Girlfriend’s Wedding” globalizes a quotation attributed to the screenwriter Bob Schneider: Love is when two people who care for each other get confused.
My Girlfriend’s Wedding
Through Dec. 21 at Anthology Film Archives, Manhattan; anthologyfilmarchives.org.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
