Review of I Know Where I'm Going (2009) by Mikey M — 28 Mar 2010

I've been watching Powell and Pressburger's 1945 film I Know Where I'm Going! kind of obsessively, for months, and probably driving friends nuts talking about it. I've been trying to figure out why I love it so much, basically.

The movie blindsided me - as it does a lot of people, I gather. I knew who The Archers were by then - I'd seen The Red Shoes, of course. But I didn't know anything about Powell and Pressburger, not really, until one night in my early twenties, when I Know Where I'm Going! showed up in the middle of the night on PBS.

There are so many movies, and so many different kinds of movies, about people falling in love. Lord knows I've seen hundreds of them, in my time. Why is this one my favorite? Why is it the favorite of so many movie geeks, some of whom take vacations in Scotland to visit filming locations?

On the one hand, the movie's a very midcentury Brit romantic comedy, and all about a modern girl who's dead set on marrying the wealthy industrialist who owns the company she works for. Which no one, even her distant banker father, seems to think is a very good plan. (In the only license given the kind of surreal excess that so permeates, say, The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffman, Wendy Hiller has a nightmare in which she literally marries the man's chemical company, rather than him.) Joan Webster makes all her train connections and keeps to her itinerary, all the way to the Hebrides, where...gods and fate and magic and life have another schedule for her to keep. She's never going to make it to that island where she's supposed to get married, you know that from the get go.

On the other hand, the movie's a fairy tale, really, about a haughty princess who thinks she's the shit and puts on airs because she's going to marry the Lord of the Islands, and then she's waylaid by weather (there is, no kidding, a giant, mythic killer whirlpool in this movie that has to be navigated - it lacks a real monster at the center, but that's about it) and all her schemes unravel. And she finds out the pleasant local yoik who's been aiding her is the real Lord of the Islands right around the same time she realizes she loves the True King, and this is going to wreck everything. There is a wild woman/witch character who's...just so great, and a castle with a curse on it for the Lairds of Kiloran that turns out not so much a curse at all, really.

When I say "fairy tale" about this movie, I mean that literally, and I don't mean that Powell and Pressburger plop down a bunch of tropes, cleverly or not, onto a modern story, I mean that I Know Where I'm Going! is a modern story in which magic is subtly real, kind of magical realist, actually. When I read One Hundred Years of Solitude a few years after seeing the movie, it felt very similar.

Visually, the movie is so striking, and they make all of these odd choices that you'd think wouldn't work, but they just make the film stronger. You spend a lot of time watching silhouettes speaking Gaelic to each other in front of what seem like the biggest, stormiest skies in the world. This is not generally how you spend minutes and minutes of a romantic comedy. The story keeps diving into new characters' smaller stories, there's this running subplot about a trained eagle being hunted as a villain, but he's really a hero - I Know Where I'm Going! can be a little taxing for friends who like their plots straighter and simpler.

In the US, anyway, I Know Where I'm Going! is one of those movie geek movies, these days. It was actually a very popular film, here in 1947 and in the UK in 1945, and ought to be watched more widely, I think. I'm always surprised when women friends who love old movies and old romantic movies in particular have never even heard of it. If An Affair to Remember or All that Heaven Allows can be so well-remembered that people who make movies endlessly reference these movies, even, why is I Know Where I'm Going! so forgottten, relatively?

Anyway, there aren't that many movies I press others to see, will badger them about and bring up, again, when they passed last time. I Know Where I'm Going! Is one of the few. It's a movie that never loses its charm or luster, whose beauty and wisdom seem greater every time I see it again, and a movie about people falling in love I'll be in love with my whole life, I'm pretty sure.

If I had that "Which movie would you bring to a desert island?" option open to me, this is the movie I'd bring. If you never see any other movies in your life, see this one. I Know Where I'm Going! is - really and completely and utterly - what's claimed about so many movies that...just aren't. It's enchanting, and never loses its power.