No mindless eye-candy for mass consumption these films suggest instead an efflourescence of fin de siecle screen decadence
No mindless eye-candy for mass consumption, these films suggest instead an efflourescence of fin de siecle screen decadence, as auteurs challenge the conventions of an already self-reflexive genre.Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s insoucient Aids musical Jeanne et le Garcon Formidable, for example, pays tribute to Demy movies such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg by creating a gleaming Paris in which characters suddenly break into song routines. Based on real events among the Sicilian mafioso, Roberta Torre’s Tano da Morire, meanwhile, contrives a different kind of “authenticity”. Popular entertainment, they were regarded as low-cultural cousins to serious cinema. If there was any transcendence, it was a cheap escapism, a sugary pacifier for the masses.Following on the heels of more recent works of the Seventies and Eighties, such as Cabaret and the small screen works of Dennis Potter, the new crop of musicals in Edinburgh rework such outmoded views of the genre by choosing to articulate often sombre concerns through an all singin’ all dancin’ aesthetic. Recognising the subversive quality of the musical, they channel contemporary anxieties surrounding mortality, violence and alienation into wide-screen spectacle and a ravishing excess of costume and design. Sure, there’s been the odd attempt to resuscitate the genre – Alan Parker’s Evita, Woody Allen’s Everybody Says I Love You – but for the most part, its toe-tapping artifice has been quietly consigned to the cultural rubbish bin of kitsch anachronism.
Crafted for a mass audience and churned out by studios on a production line, the classical Hollywood musicals of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties were never accorded such status. From Italy, there is Roberta Torre’s Mafia musical, Tano da Morire. Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s dark millenial fable The Hole erupts into Technicolor Fifties cabaret numbers, while Australian Stephan Elliot follows Priscilla Queen of the Desert with Welcome To Woop Woop, a deliriously tasteless take on the musicals of Rogers and Hammerstein.
When he spoke of music, Pater was striving to define the timeless transcendence of great art. From France comes Jeanne et le Garcon Formidable, a Jacques Demy hommage about love and Aids, starring Demy’s son Mathieu. So it’s intriguing to find the musical making a come back at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival. There are enough coups de theatre here to fill a dozen shows, ranging from the sight of a near-naked Cupid (pure Caravaggio), disconsolately retrieving his misdirected arrows, and a Dal-esque riot scene, in which manic fire-eating and flag-waving are conducted to the hellish cuckoo-calls of a double- headed pierrot on stilts It’s kitsch, it’s clever. The tale heads inexorably towards a melancholic, cynical conclusion, but in uncorking its mute characters’ fateful desires, it allows for the kind of warm-hearted clowning that Red Zone lacked.
Go at least once.Runs at the Pleasance, Venue 33 until 31 August (0131-556 6550). `All art constantly aspires to the condition of music,” claimed Walter Pater, the cultural essayist, but it’s been a while since film aspired to the condition of the musical. Above all, Once shows Derevo’s head honcho, Anton Adassinski, and his four other performers, to be as possessed of traditional slapstick skills as they are of a macabre, absurdist imagination.
Each scene is so carefully choreographed that the mood can alter with the volatility of a dream: the skittish waitress and refined suitor dance with automaton precision; suddenly, the envious janitor is being chased around the auditorium by a fascistic pair of knockabout cops. For one thing, there’s a fairy-tale narrative, involving a battle between a beak-nosed janitor and a suave tycoon-type for the heart of a beautiful waitress, that rages across fantastical landscapes. After that saturnine antishow, with its flickering shadows, sour white faces and malevolent posturing, Once – billed as “a tragic unhappy love”- comes as something of a surprise It could even be called audience-friendly. ANYONE who saw Derevo’s award-winning Red Zone last year might be forgiven for thinking that the Russian clown troupe was more concerned with lowering its audience’s endorphin levels to the point of clinical depression than giving people something to smile about. She was bricking it.” For the sheer range of his performance, the tautness and vitality of his language, and the masterful comic insight, David Benson has few peers.And he can sing, the swine.