DVD: Wonderwall

Social mores and the nature of what’s taboo change as time passes. The once acceptable or abhorred can become the opposite. The psychedelic-era British film Wonderwall is a case in point. Its storyline is built around a man who finds a hole in the wall between his and his neighbour’s flat. The wall becomes the wonderwall of the title as he looks through it to a naked, or near-naked, woman.

And yet this was not a film about the unpleasantness of a peeping tom. It was a fantasy, a whimsy from an era when free love was a bandwagon for jumping on. It had an unexpected afterlife as Oasis’s Noel Gallagher saw it on TV and borrowed the title for his greatest song. 

Being Beatles-related, Wonderwall also has cachet. George Harrison composed the soundtrack music. The Fool, the designers of the Fabs’ Apple boutique and the inner sleeve of Sgt. Pepper, contributed to the film’s imagery. It also had brief aural appearance of some searing guitar by Eric Clapton. Its deeply irritating main character is played by Jack MacGowran, while the female lead is Jane Birkin, cast as a model called Penny Lane in her last British film before making Slogan in France. There are drugs, skits on silent films, hippies, a rendering of straight life and everything else expected from a psychedelic cash-in.

Despite period trappings, Wonderwall is deadly dull. This new release includes two versions – the second is director Joe Massot’s cut which trims 15 minutes: he must have realised it was a yawn. All the same, this is an exemplary restoration which looks fantastic. The extras also include some images and brief, written information sections on the film and its cast, as well as a short by Massot in which the cameraman was Beatles photographer Robert Freeman. The booklet is riddled with howlers (apparently Serge Gainsbourg was Belgian).

See this as a curio, but do not expect more than a footnote which, because of its associations, has acquired a reputation out of all proportion to its few merits.

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