Critics reviews

Welles set out to document an end of an era, but the strange liminal moment he captured might not yet have passed.

Part withering self-portrait, part savage satire, The Other Side of the Wind turns a birthday party for an aging studio-era director (John Huston) into a kaleidoscopic send-up of late-‘60s media, masculinit, New Hollywood upstarts, and European art-house auteurs alike.

Kaleidoscopic, labyrinthine and disorienting, The Other Side of the Wind is unmistakably Wellesian.

In The Other Side of the Wind, Welles purposefully synthesized every film style that had come along since the late 1950s, in a bid for relevance the film mocks when Hannaford is accused of doing the same. Where Hannaford crashes and burns, Welles succeeds with brilliance, adding to the sense of tragedy surrounding the film. It should have come out in its time.

Whatever your feelings on Welles' excesses and fabulism, or the "inflated exhibitionism" referenced by MacLiammóir, he still—and always—brought "something much more" to the table, and against all odds. The results are exhilarating.

You don’t need this context to appreciate the anarchic majesty of what’s here, nor to imagine what a great tragedy it was, over the years, to think Welles’s film was languishing somewhere, impossible to complete. You don’t need the backstory to know that Welles’s movie-within-a-movie—Hannaford’s project—is a complete riot every time it intrudes on Hannaford’s party with a distorted sexual energy.

We no longer dig into the ontological past, but instead experience the shock of space-time compression as all of Hannaford’s half-century of filmmaking and experiences of manipulating others is compressed into a single night.

Arriving decades too late and right on time, the final assemblage of Orson Welles’s legendary incomplete incompletable last film is a work as sharp as a slap, as bracing as a martini tossed to the face.

A very rich film and a very difficult one. I’ve seen it nearly three times now and what I intuit about the aspects of it that “work,” and those where the seams just show too nakedly shift all the time.

It’s impossible to say whether the resulting product is what Welles would have created, but what exists certainly provides much food for thought.

Nothing is obvious in “The Other Side of the Wind,” including how Welles places people in the frame, his brilliant use of dialogue — which overlaps but also suggests that people are incapable of speaking to one another — or the delicacy with which he directs his actors, his friends and his loves.

It is a belated work of Welles’s colossal artistry, and one of the great last dramatic features by any director.