Travels With My Aunt

THE STORIES old men tell are cast differently than the stories young men tell. The difference comes out in the ways they treat the past. The young man lacks feeling in his telling, and his sense of place comes out sparse and unfamiliar. But the old man often feels too much too fondly. Travels With My Aunt is altogether an old man's work. Written by an aging Graham Greene and directed by an aged George Cukor, it is a last grand grinning caper through a glamorous era long dead. It is something to be enjoyed in the spirit of camp--nothing more than a very foolish fond old movie.

The story Cukor tells is that of Henry (Alec McGowen), a forty-year-old virgin, the most conventional sort of English bankclerk, and his 70-year-old Aunt Augusta (Maggie Smith), as promiscuous and eccentric as Henry is straightlaced. She sweeps him out of his dreary English garden away on a precarious flirtation with the underworld.

Cukor juggles stock character types and familiar plot complications with playful expertise. Henry and Augusta, along with her lover Wordsworth, a fortune-telling black African, wind up on a mock spy adventure on the Orient Express as Augusta delivers an illegal $100,000 ranson to Visconti (her wildly romantic first lover) held captive in Africa. Fortified by the belief that love conquers all, Aunt Augusta cajoles, lies, steals, blackmails, and is deported in the course of her mission. When she finally does deliver the ransom, she collapses hysterically in her now aged lover's arms only to find that he has duped her. The ransom was but a profiteering hoax, and he leaves her stranded on the African shore, her mad efforts to patch together a dream of her youth rendered futile.

AUNT AUGUSTA'S was a persistent past, and she dwells in reminiscence. She drapes herself in shoulder furs and slinky sequinned gowns, and mannerizes the carefree twenties with every flourish of her cigarette holder. Her figure has the lines of a Beardsley and her history mimics the twists of those lines. Her life was all amour--she mock-swooned at lovers' seranades, whirled waltzing in their arms, and made indulgent love to them. And when they abandoned her, she resurfaced like an unsinkable Molly Brown. This life spent sipping champagne in Grand Hotels with vast baroque rooms and parlors caressed by generations of gamblers is like an advertisement for the jet set life -- with life itself the spirited suitor of romance. It was all style and peacockery, quick passion and gondolas.

Aunt Augusta crowds the apartment she and Wordsworth share with souvenirs of her continental high life, but they give it only a faded ratty elegance. Glass ornaments flash everywhere -- the powder jars and pin bowls, gold cherubs and a chandelier that looks like an upside-down wedding cake are cheap reminders of now hollow dreams. For at 70, she is unmarried, childless, and penniless, and the mauve colored gauze through which she views her world cannot protect her from it.

The movie isn't really an ode to romanticism; rather, it is an elegy to its passing. Cukor turns sentiment to laughter, to a capricious form of skepticism that knows "the good old days" to be illusionism. The loops of his freewheeling narrative dip eagerly into the past only to circle back a bit crestfallen. And in between, that cherished romance becomes sappy to the taste.

Whimsical, quirky, sensuous Aunt Augusta is Henry's last chance at life. Henry simply hasn't lived. And it is his travels with her, to Istanbul in the flesh and into her past in reminiscence, that initiate him. Surviving one shocker after another, his stolid primness relaxes into tolerance. Augusta tells him that his legal mother was a virgin, he is accosted by whores in a sleazy Paris nightclub while a stripper twirls platinum nipples in the spotlights. It is as if Aunt Augusta were Henry's wicked fairy.

IN THE END, all of Cukor's playful digs at romanticism still haven't inured him to it. Over-fond of the past, he brings confused eyes to the present, and stretches the contrast between to ludicrous dimensions. On the Orient Express Henry smokes dope with a wealthy bluejeaned backpacking American girl. Her father is in the CIA, her boyfriend a pop artist, and she can talk of nothing but the fact that her period is late and whom among her countless bedmates could the culprit be? Then Henry sleeps with her. The girl is just a modern version of Aunt Augusta, but stripped of the illusions. She faces facts with the same irresponsible gaiety in which Aunt Augusta cloaked her dreams.

Hers is a bare-faced present -- it has all the substance of the past and none of its style.

And you get the feeling that style, for Cukor, counts for more than it is worth. Moreover, he knows it. So he compromises. He pleads sympathy for bankrupt dreams on the condition that those dreams not be indulged. And he makes a sketch-book movie of daydreams gone aglimmering.