Orson Welles is a name that will live forever in the pantheon of film history, due in large part to Citizen Kane (1941) which is regarded in many circles as the best American film ever made, if not the best in general (not an opinion I share by the way). I myself have only seen two of Welles films myself, being the aforementioned Citizen Kane, and his adaptation of Macbeth (1948) and I did thoroughly enjoy both of them and saw the reasons in those films as to why Welles was and is so revered. It was with this very limited knowledge that I sat down to watch Orson Welles' lost final film, The Other Side of the Wind (2018). Filmed between 1970 and 1976 after Welles return to Hollywood from Europe. Some editing was done in the 1980s but was not finished before Welles' death in 1985 and due to several legal and financial issues was unable to be released. The rights were acquired in 2014 and the film was released initially at the Venice Film Festival in 2018 and later onto Netflix in November of that year. After I heard this film was coming out I was intrigued to see how the final product would look, and my initial reaction to it is one unfortunately of negativity and confusion. The film follows the final day of director Jake Hannaford (John Huston) who in an attempt to resurrect his waning career attempts to make a flashy and modern film full of gratuitous sex and violence. He invites the press and several of his colleagues and friends to his home for his 70th birthday where he has an early screening of his new film and allows the press full access to film the entire evening.
The film is clearly metaphorical to Welles' on career and could be seen as semi-biographic to his life, but I don't think it should be taken as an accurate one to one. The film is instead more of a satire of the new avant-garde filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s and how these filmmakers were killing off old Hollywood. Hannaford, like Welles, is a director born out of the old Hollywood system and a director who is being replaced by these up and coming directors and so in an attempt to hold onto his career makes a film like them which turns in to an incomprehensible mess. Unfortunately, I feel like in the films attempt to be satirical it almost becomes all the worst parts of the thing it is satirising and doesn't do that job very well either. What is clearly good about the film is its style and acting. This is to be expected from Welles who is clearly a talented director, and the style and look of the film is something I really liked. Although never reaching the levels of quality of Citizen Kane in its shot composition and scope, it is still very effective and shows that despite being in the waning years of his career Welles was still a very capable director. Filmed in a mockumentary style, the colour changes from black and white to full colour depending on which camera we are looking through at that time, and also the quality of the images are constantly changing for that same reason. And although I believe that the film fails in its attempts at satire on the whole, what I can say is the clips of Hannaford's film that we do see are an almost perfect representation of the films it is meant to be portraying, with the very sexualised images, shot composition and set design, it is spot on. The acting is also solid across the board, with special mentions to John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich who plays Brooks Otterlake, Hannaford's protege, who both put in very good and gripping performances.
The main problem I have with this film is that I just found it really, really boring. The story that the film is trying to tell could be interesting and it was something that I was looking forward to seeing, but I just never got invested in to the film. I paused the film halfway through the film and spoke to my parents about it, and at this point I was still unsure whether I liked it or not. I remember thinking that it wasn't exactly gripping, I wasn't entirely invested in it and I was also very confused as to what was going on, but I also had a feeling in the back of my mind that something was going to click for me and I would suddenly 'get it'. This moment never came. I did become less confused, as pieces of the film fell together but I was never more invested and never less bored. This initial confusion mainly came from how many characters are put into this film and how little many of them matter, with the majority being very pointless and not memorable in the slightest but acted well. I was very disappointed as I was looking forward to seeing the film, and even though I didn't have huge expectations what expectations I did have were massively under met.
This is a film that I can see doing well and being enjoyed by many in the field of film academia and film history due to the context behind its release. I also feel like this film will be appreciated for its style by many people who watch it, but for me it just did not grab me. I can obviously not overlook the fact that the film, despite being shot entirely by Welles, can never be an exact recreation of what the film may have been like if Welles had fully finished the film, editing and all, but as for what we got I was not a fan. As for the general film going public this is not a film I would recommend. It is too long and to dull to grab your attention and keep you entertained and unless you have prior experience with films of this type and are a fan of them I just would not go there. As for me, I am a fan of some avantgarde films, but it is very much a hit and miss with me and them. And this film is an unfortunately large miss.