Cinema: Bird in Flight

There are only two ways to beat a cliche: either make fun of it—or do it better than anyone else. Michael Same does both with Joanna—and thereby makes the most dazzling directorial debut of the year.

His heroine (Genevieve Waite) is a Sassoon-style adolescent come down to London to study art. Soon artists start studying Joanna. She plays musical beds with every boy who rubs against her, makes friends with the world, and generally lives without any of the conventional moral hang-ups. The trouble is that the freedom bag turns out to be a prison without walls. Pleasure is everywhere, but Joanna is nowhere, until she makes a commitment by falling in love with a brooding black man (Calvin Lockhart). The affair winds down to tragedy; mixed up with the Mob, he gets a long stretch in quod. Joanna, three months pregnant, goes back home to have his child.

The story is overly familiar, and Joanna could have been just another imitative chronicle of a wounded bird, in the manner of Darling or Poor Cow. But Director Same, who also wrote the script, has given it purpose and individuality by flashing back and forth through Joanna’s life, ransacking her dreams, exploring her past and minutely exposing the style of a swinger with inventive images that linger in the retina. Not all of the film works. Its sometimes derivative surface is equally indebted to Jean-Luc Godard and shampoo commercials. Even Edgar Guest would have been embarrassed by the lyrics that Pop Poet Rod McKuen composed to match his banal score. But Same makes his cast perform with the precision and refinement of a repertory company.

As the amoral, wide-eyed girl, Genevieve Waite* is startling: she is one of the few new English-accented stars of the ’60s who do not look or act like a secondhand Julie Christie. Not especially prepossessing or crafty, she is totally free of mannerisms, as natural as someone on a Chelsea sidewalk. Her fellow players seem equally and effectively plucked from real life. The best of them is Donald Sutherland, as a frail, talentless aristocrat, whose tentative worship of the Beautiful People is so well portrayed that it turns a bit part into a leading role.

* A South African, she has been barred from re-entering her homeland because of Joanna’s interracial love scenes.