与姑妈同游

在一场位于伦敦的葬礼之中，银行家的儿子亨利（亚历克·马克温AlecMcCowen饰）第一次见到了奥古斯塔（玛吉·史密斯MaggieSmith饰），在传闻中，奥古斯塔是一个非常古怪的女人，亨利甚至以为她早就已经死了。　　在奥古斯塔的要求之下，亨利决定陪她一起去巴黎，哪知道已经启程之后，亨利才发现奥古斯塔彻头彻尾的骗了自己。她实际上是要去找一个名叫埃尔克莱（罗伯特·斯蒂芬斯RobertStephens饰）的男人。对于奥古斯塔的欺骗，亨利感到非常的火大，但他已经上了贼船，再也没有回头路可走了。就这样，亨利和奥古斯塔一路奔波，遇到了接连不断的意外，在此过程中，亨利对这个古怪的女人有了更深层次的了解

A George Cukor picture made in his twilight years, TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is adapted from Graham Greene’s skylarking eponymous novel, and marks Dame Maggie Smith’s much awaited follow-up to her Oscar-winning turn in THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODY (1969), resultantly is blissfully bestowed with an Oscar nomination No. 3.

Playing the titular aunt, who is twice of her real age (by virtue of the able make-up artist José Antonio Sánchez), of London bank manager Henry Puling (McCowen, nearly a decade senior of Smith), Maggie’s Augusta Bertram enters Henry’s sedate life like a down-in-the-mouth raven during the funeral of Henry’s mother. A long-lost aunt who has a flamboyant dress sense, an ear-piercing voice and eccentric make-up, from whom Henry receives the first bolt of blue that the woman whose ash he is holding is not his birth mother, and there’s more to come.

The film looks exceptionally rumbustious in the hands of a septuagenarian, a giddying caper globe-trots from London to Paris, then hopping on the Oriental Express to Istanbul and back, culminating in the terra firma of North Africa. Admittedly not everyone can stomach the whole package of garish fluff and ceaseless palaver prima facie, but once the ransom-collecting story-line is established, Augusta and Henry's adventure eases up into a more affable romp interspersed with Augusta’s reminiscences of her youth and sundry love affairs.

Maggie Smith’s frivolously loquacious personage briskly corroborates the time-honored proverb“never judge a book by its cover”, beneath all her self-absorbed wittering and jitters, Augusta emerges as a heart-of-gold, hopeless romantic even after toiling in the oldest profession for most of her life, and we can never quite decide whether she is dimwitted or not, when you think she is, she can gainsay it by intuitively snaffling something costly to shuck off her financial fix, so you opine maybe she isn’t, then, how come she could be so credulously hoodwinked along the way?

To counterpoint Smith’s pyrotechnic extravagance, Alec McCowen’s fusty nephew is tagged along with mild bewilderment but seldom loses his grip of his composure and slips into a plebeian laughingstock, he can be exasperating sometimes, but cunningly proves that he is worth his salt in the final reveal. Among the peripheral players, Louis Gossett Jr. is the cock of the walk as Augusta’scurrently live-in partner, anAfrican fortune-teller called Wordsworth, who makes no bones about smuggling marijuana inside an ash-ful urn and also lords over le quartier rouge in the Continent.

A plush-looking, brassy-sounding, but ultimately spirit-elevating felix culpa doesn’t desecrate Cukor’s cachet, like itsfreeze-frame ending implies: coins have only two faces, and there is no one definite answer to the triad’s final question becauselife is far more multifarious than that.

referential points: Cukor’s MY FAIR LADY (1964, 7.8/10); Ronald Neame’sTHE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODY (1969, 8.0/10); Herbert Ross’ CALIFORNIA SUITE (1978, 5.4/10).