晴朗的日子里你能看见永远

Bookended by psychedelic opening/close credit sequences, ON A CLEAR DAY… is Minnelli’s penultimate feature, and rightfully captures the era’s fantastical ethos, based on Alan Jay Lerner’s own musical, it is basically a two-hander between a chain-smoking ingénue Daisy Gamble (Streisand) and a psychiatrist Prof. Marc Chabot (Montand), from whom the former seeks help to cure her nicotine addiction through hypnotherapy, which only opens a hornets’ nest laced with other parapsychological components like ESP and reincarnation.

Yes, Daisy is a clairvoyant, endowed with a magical green thumb and subconsciously remembers all her reincarnations (including future ones), and Chabot is increasingly fascinated by one of her previous incarnations as Lady Melinda Tentrees of the Regency era, who prospers a rags-to-riches ascendancy but eventually is betrayed by her husband and condemned for her “otherness”. Meantime, Daisy, who is kept from the acknowledgement of her preternatural condition, becomes smitten with an urbane Chabot, which threats the relationship with her bien-pensant fiancé Warren (Blyden). When the cat is let out of the bag, again, it is a persistently telepathic calling (when Montand crooning COMING BACK TO ME) that brings the pair together and squares up their respective disillusions, with Chabot perceiving a piece of tidings from the future to salve his compunction.

It is amusing to think that anyone is able to fall under the hypnotic spell of Montand’s English elocution with his thick French accent, and Minnelli’s cavalier direction of it doesn’t mitigate any skeptical glances, yet, Streisand is exceptionally versatile in her two roles, gussying and glamorizing herself up as she enchants us with those Burton Lane-penned melodies with such facility and emotion, they might sound a shade treacly, passé and over-sentimental, however, the timbre of her voice is supernal, and her unconventional beauty is emblazoned in such a florid fashion that can keep aesthetic fatigue at bay. Nonetheless, the underlined every-girl-fancies-herself-as-a-glamor-puss propensity feels antiquated.

A product of its own time, ON A CLEAR DAY… is unique in melding an above-board romance with the counterculture of parapsychology, but with a simper rather than a bang, too tame and cutesy for its own good (Jack Nicholson’s character is ruefully underutilized, he is supposed to be the right match for Daisy, right?), Minnelli’s picture tepidly sails through the less fathomed waters.

referential entries: Gene Kelly’s HELLO, DOLLY! (1969, 7.3/10); George Cukor’s MY FAIR LADY (1964, 7.8/10).