Cinema: Ersatz Alexandria

Transforming Lawrence Durrell's massively complex Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Cled) into a single coherent film is an impossible task. Obviously. Four full-length films could hardly unravel the interlocking time structure and convoluted personal relationships in the four separate but interrelated novels. Thus 20th Century-Fox might have been well-advised to follow the traditional Hollywood practice of isolating a single incident from one of the novels and blowing it up into a complete story for the screen. But fearlessly, the studio resolved to distill the essence of the entire Quartet —carefully constructed around Freud's idea that "every sexual act is a process in which four persons are involved" —into one big, sloppy movie. Assigned the thankless task of giving order and meaning to Durrell's universe, Screenwriter Lawrence B. Marcus eliminated Clea and shaped the other characters into soap-opera carvings. The result, given the overall title of Justine, is not mere condensation but virtually complete evaporation.

Those filmgoers who have read the Quartet will be somewhat baffled by much of the plot and motivation in the film; those who have not will be completely and hopelessly confused. The first —and better—part of Justine is devoted mostly to atmospherics, establishing the characters and their relationships with one another and the city of Alexandria. Director George Cukor had a good old-fashioned time sweeping his camera over studio-made streets and palaces, working himself up to a murder at a masked ball. After that, he and Screenwriter Marcus apparently decided that it was time to get down to business and in a barrage of exposition hurled the film into complete chaos.

Ready? In the late 1930s, Justine (Anouk Aimée), the sensual wife of an Egyptian banker named Nessim (John Vernon), had been yearning after the aloof British diplomat Pursewarden (Dirk Bogarde), although she had to content herself with the favors of Darley (Michael York), a young writer and lover of a belly dancer named Melissa (Anna Karina). Suddenly Justine and Nessim are revealed as Coptic Christians involved in smuggling guns to Palestine so that the Jews can fight the British. Pursewarden, who knows of their treachery, keeps silent, apparently out of love for Justine. Melissa meanwhile goes off to a TB clinic, and Nessim's brother (Robert Forster) is assassinated by his own people. And so it goes for another hour until various deaths and suicides bring Justine to an abrupt conclusion.

Of the large and noteworthy cast, only Bogarde and Philippe Noiret (as a diplomatic attache) manage to survive the confusion with any dignity at all. Worse, there is absolutely no trace of Alexandria itself, that city Durrell called "the wine press of love." Fox dispatched a second-string camera crew for a brisk six weeks' worth of location filming, but Cukor shot most of the picture at home in California—on a set that conjured up visions of Sidney Greenstreet-Peter Lorre North African thrillers. The ersatz locale is painfully obvious. "Justine," wrote Cyril Connolly, "is the spirit of Alexandria, sensual and skeptical, self-torturing and passionate." Cukor and his collaborators have raided Durrell's exotic garden and left only a pale hothouse flower.