I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING! 4K Review: Talking About the Weather

A self-possessed young woman, Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller), points herself at the Scottish island of Kiloran, where a wealthy, long-distance suitor is waiting to marry her. She's always been like this: "I know where I'm going!" is her mantra, and I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) is the film.

We see Joan as a child declaring her direction and marching off with a purpose, and then grow up with her to find her baffled father learning in real time that his now 25-year-old daughter has arranged her own wedding, and is on the train to Scotland, tonight, to seal the deal.

Naturally, humans plan, and God -- very much a presence in the story, in forms shifting from the strictly Anglican to older, more pagan superstitions -- laughs.

That laughter comes in the booming form of a three-day storm that strands Joan on the mainland in Scotland with only the locals and a dashing naval officer (Roger Livesay) to keep her company. The officer, Torquil MacNeil, turns out to be the lord of the very island that Joan has pointed herself at, creating (for her) an unnerving dissonance between the mind and the matter of her plan.

Joan is so directive that she is frequently framed in profile in the first third of the picture (the artwork on the Criterion cover captures the recurring motif), her nose jutting screen right as though dragging her to her destiny. The village around her, though, operates in a wiser, more lived-in mode. Might there be a better life in the here and now than the one Joan has designed for herself at a remove?

If you've ever seen a movie in your life, you know where all this is going. Powell & Pressburger delight in giving their audience a gentle good time as Joan tries, and tries, and tries, to stick to her stated purpose -- "I know where I'm going!" -- while the entire community and even the landscape around her seem to be asking, "...but why?"

Updating Criterion spine #94, which (prior to now) had only been available in DVD (and before that, laserdisc), the "new" 4K transfer of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1945 romance is such an improvement in both picture and sound that a short featurette on the disc gives the viewer a side-by-side comparison, just to let us marvel at the work.

"New" is in quotes because the BFI's restoration is actually from 2021, approved by longtime Powell stan Martin Scorsese, and of course Powell's widow, Thelma Schoonmaker. Incredible amounts of speckling, print damage, and other age artifacts have been magically erased, leaving a pristine black-and-white image (presented on the disc in Standard Dynamic Range).

I won't say it "looks like it was shot yesterday," because it's still very much a product of its time in terms of lenses, lighting, depth of field, and so forth. Say, instead, that this update of I Know Where I'm Going! looks like a camera negative unearthed from a climate-controlled storage unit, and only recently developed.

This, then, makes it all the more delightful to watch how nimbly Powell & Pressburger dart from location photography to set work to rear-projection elements that blend the two. It's a rapid-fire construction of time and place that becomes a masterpiece of orchestration; individual shots within scenes must have been shot weeks or months apart, across a distance of hundreds of miles, but come together beautifully.

Along with the featurette on the restoration, the new release -- which features both a 4K and a Blu-ray copy of the film -- also resurrects the Ian Christie commentary from the laserdisc in 1994.

There's also a half-hour documentary from the same year by filmmaker Mark Cousins (The Story of Film), interviewing New Yorkers about their relationship to I Know Where I'm Going!, a classic British programmer that never really hit widely in the States. A lovely jacket essay by critic Imogen Sara Smith completes the package.

The film will be available December 9 from The Criterion Collection in a 4K+Blu-ray two-disc edition.