When
in Split, Croatia, drop by the Joker Center shopping mall to see Oja Kodar’s
sculpture of her longtime life-partner, Orson Welles. In a cinematic sense,
Welles also put his collaborator and muse on pedestal in The Dreamers, his oblique and of course unfinished adaptation of
two Isak Dinesen short stories, which screened last night at MoMA as part of
the 2015 To Save and Project International Festival of Preservation’s Unknown
Welles sidebar.
Among
the program of maddeningly incomplete Wellesiana, The Dreamers best stands alone as a discrete film in its present
state. That said, Welles’ original trailer for F for Fake further advances the docu-hybrid’s meta jokes, while the
extended teaser for The Deep ought to
make Welles fans drool for the work-print screening on Sunday. Unfortunately,
the work-print screening of The Other
Side of the Wind scenes edited by Welles are distractingly rough and the
events they depict—a film shoot jeopardized by the abrupt departure of its star—are
spookily prescient of the fate that would befall the still unfinished film.
While
still somewhat fragmentary, The Dreamers manages
to end on a note that roughly approximates closure. It is a deceptively simple,
almost confessional film, focusing first on Welles playing a 19th
Century trader obsessed with the immortal Italian diva Pellegrina Leoni, whom
Kodar then portrays in more recent times. In their interpretation, she becomes
sort of a Flying Dutchman Norma Desmond. Although Welles and Kodar pitched the
film to number of big name stars, he clearly takes pleasure from Kodar’s
close-ups.
