A Film Canon

 

 

'I Know Where I'm Going!' takes A Canterbury Tale's deflection of narrative into topography to its poetic conclusion, opening with headstrong Joan Webster's (Wendy Hiller) arrival at the Isle of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides. There, unfavourable weather prevents her sailing to her wealthy fiancee's lodgings on the (fictional) Isle of Killoran, forcing her to pass the time exploring her surrounds, under the guide of Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey), the last of a small outfit of soldiers posted to the area. In another director's hands, this could descend to so much Scottish kitsch, but Powell and Pressburger manage to imbue the landscape with a mystical, or mythological, autonomy - most explicitly in the subsumption of Joan and Torquil into the romantic curse placed upon his family - and, more specifically, in his final, tentative entry into the ruined castle in which that curse is engraved - but most poetically in the subsumption of the film's arc into the twin, ever-widening gyres of a local falconer's latest achievement, and the spectacular use of the infamous whirlpool of Corryvreckan, in which the final sea voyage almost perishes. In the same way, the duo select their locations and subjects with such idiosyncratic precision as to transform them into a host of minor, charismatic characters - from the sole phone box, built on the edge of a steep waterfall, and so rendered redundant by the roar of the winter months, to the local seal colony, whose "song" merges with the Gaelic of their neighbours to evoke a romantic fusion of language and landscape, to which the wry, cultured script is a mere counterpoint.