A story of a two divorcees trying to affirm their love for each other amongst angry ghosts, Blithe Spirit is a good example of that traditional English form of comedy: very mundane happenings peppered with acerbic lines delivered in what is now considered “dead-pan.” Added to that are Lean’s mastery of light and shadows, cheesy but effective special effects, and a wonderful use of color, and one has a very entertaining movie delivered with a filmmaking that can only be described as enchanting. The plot could be the answer to the question posed by Lean’s next movie, Brief Encounter: what if the affair did go far enough? Would the man eventually regret his decision? Would the woman finally be granted happiness? The answer of course is no. Even the spirits, finally rid of their bodies, still seem bored and unfulfilled. Lean and Coward thus condemn us all to an eternal search for happiness—which, from the fun that the characters seem to be having, doesn’t seem all that bad.
Of all the characters, the most interestingly portrayed maybe Madame Arcati, the spiritual medium whom the couple invited for the purpose of exposing her “fraud,” and whose actions unleashed the spirits and the unresolved past on the insecure couple. She isn’t aloof and decaying like other old cinematic mediums, or a nut-job who quite obviously is faking the funk. Arcati is a lively British eccentric who clearly believes in what she does and loves what she does. It was her “fraud” that the film’s other characters was supposed to expose, and instead it was theirs that she exposed. She was also the film’s stand-in within the film, unleashing the magic of cinema to the “realism” of cinema. To that extent, Arcati is Lean’s stand-in, as the character that opened the audience—who expects the reality of pictures played before them—to the magic of photographic effects.
The other really interesting aspect of the movie is its use of Technicolor. The ghosts weren’t merely ghosts—invisible and all that—but separated from the “world” by their color (ashen gray, sometimes greenish) and how gusts of air from unknown sources that blow their gowns about make them look immaterial. Again, Lean does the invisible thing when he needs to, but his reliance on the coloring effect emphasizes the separation between the living and not living. This in turn emphasizes the characters’ placement in relation to one another: characters who could not see the “ghosts” looking in the wrong direction (except for Arcati, whose upturned gaze always looks at the correct general direction), the always close husband but never close enough, and the stiff wife who competes against the former wife’s ghost. These constant shifts emphasize that eternal “search,” and the fun to be had to look for something one cannot even see.
Of all the characters, the most interestingly portrayed maybe Madame Arcati, the spiritual medium whom the couple invited for the purpose of exposing her “fraud,” and whose actions unleashed the spirits and the unresolved past on the insecure couple. She isn’t aloof and decaying like other old cinematic mediums, or a nut-job who quite obviously is faking the funk. Arcati is a lively British eccentric who clearly believes in what she does and loves what she does. It was her “fraud” that the film’s other characters was supposed to expose, and instead it was theirs that she exposed. She was also the film’s stand-in within the film, unleashing the magic of cinema to the “realism” of cinema. To that extent, Arcati is Lean’s stand-in, as the character that opened the audience—who expects the reality of pictures played before them—to the magic of photographic effects.
The other really interesting aspect of the movie is its use of Technicolor. The ghosts weren’t merely ghosts—invisible and all that—but separated from the “world” by their color (ashen gray, sometimes greenish) and how gusts of air from unknown sources that blow their gowns about make them look immaterial. Again, Lean does the invisible thing when he needs to, but his reliance on the coloring effect emphasizes the separation between the living and not living. This in turn emphasizes the characters’ placement in relation to one another: characters who could not see the “ghosts” looking in the wrong direction (except for Arcati, whose upturned gaze always looks at the correct general direction), the always close husband but never close enough, and the stiff wife who competes against the former wife’s ghost. These constant shifts emphasize that eternal “search,” and the fun to be had to look for something one cannot even see.
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