The V.I.P.s feels a bit like the photographs of Cindy Sherman. Every frame is utterly staged, every background synthetic, every dramatic moment artificial. In planes, and airport lounges and hotel rooms, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton pose becomingly at canted angles. He wears a hunter red tie and scarf with his dark suit. She wears beige, then pink, then crisp black and white. There are very few windows. The camera lovingly, unhurriedly observes them. The V.I.P.s knows it is a film, a product, a Hollywood thing. It doesn't pretend to be more. The film is a mechanical glamour play set in a beautiful 1960s box. Like in a Christmas display, the characters and settings are pretty packages with nothing inside. Liz Taylor is the beautiful but neglected trophy wife with an endless supply of wonderful head adornments: velvet hats, fur hoods, sculpted hairdos. Richard Burton is the commanding business tycoon who learns to love his wife only when it may be too late. Louis Jourdan is the charming international gambler angling for her Liz's affection. Another triangle includes Rod Taylor as a struggling Australian tractor magnate and Maggie Smith as the staid, British secretary who loves him. These are the kind of characters who'll later show up in the television glamour-comedies of the 1970s (Love Boat, Fantasy Island), those shows where the contrived problems of the super-elite are exposed, wrestled with and neatly solved within the course of 50 minutes. The difference here is that The V.I.P.s doesn't play anything for guffaws or vaudeville. Instead it's a pseudo-elegant melodrama comprising sedate cinematography, uncluttered sets, and subdued performances. Even the comic relief characters , Margaret Rutherford as the absent- minded aristocrat and Orson Welles as the tax-evading film director, evoke a Hollywood-style dignity. Almost everyone gets what they want at the end. And we are reassured that those who don't will triumph later. Absolutely nothing is at stake. Watching the V.I.P.s is akin to riding in a Rolls Royce Phantom, washing down a Valium with thirty-year-old scotch --totally relaxing, totally removed. Yet there are a few intriguing cracks in the soothing facade. Burton gives his trophy wife a diamond bracelet for her coddled wrist; He later wounds that same wrist in an act he claims proves his passion. Orson Welles marries a vapid but gorgeous Italian actress, but repeatedly kisses his petite, male accountant on the lips. Not much is made of these moments. But they are subtly suggestive, as though the perplexing, inexorable nature of messy reality is stealing in.
Review of The V.I.P.s
