So… barring any new recommendations that cross my path, I don’t have any more unwatched musicals to see after this round of catch-ups! Wow! And boo hoo, &c
Anna (Pierre Koralnik 1967)
Jean-Claude Brialy’s photog goes on the hunt for Perfect Beauty Anna Karina, unaware that she’s under his nose the entire time thanks to Clark Kent camouflage. A musical starring Karina, Brialy, and Serge Gainsbourg, with songs written by Gainsbourg, sounds like a can’t-miss prospect, but it misses all right. The songs are awful (I suspect Gainsbourg only got Marianne Faithful to show up for her cameo by giving her the only good song of the lot) and the direction resembles b-roll footage of a William Klein failure.
8 femmes (François Ozon 2002)
80% of the French actresses Americans have heard of headline this weird murder mystery musical set in the 50s. Like
the Women, there are only female speaking parts, but unlike
the Women, this movie has no clear tone, and not in a fun way. I’m not sure what Ozon thinks he’s doing here, but what we get is a total mess of over the top mugging from all principals (with Emmanuelle Beart the funniest and Isabelle Huppert surprisingly the most annoying) as they try to solve which of the titular eight women killed the head of the household. Oh and then the films grinds to a halt for poorly staged music numbers, nearly all of which involve the principal performer in crude spotlight facing the camera while left to their own devices for what constitutes choreography. Embarrassing. By the time the film tries to fold in lesbianism (over and over), incest, and suicide, I was completely done with this. The costumes and set direction are great. What’s occupying them is not.
Haut bas fragile (Jacques Rivette 1995)
A coma victim recovers and uncovers, a thief steals and dances with wild abandon, and a librarian seeks a song she’s sure connects with her unknown birth mother, among other adventures. Oh, and after about an hour into this three hour movie, we occasionally get musical numbers. Here Rivette truly surprised me: of all the French directors in this write-up, he’s the least-flashy and thus the one I least expected to understand and
show how movement works in a musical. But he gets it, so clearly and without it ever interrupting his other goals here. For once, invoking a classic musical as inspiration (here
Give a Girl a Break and
I Love Melvin) yields actual on-screen evidence of someone having seen and processed their inspiration. A folding chair, an errant sander, a gazebo, patio furniture: zero-frills props, and yet Rivette figures out how to use them and film with/within them in long takes dedicated to kinetic interactions of bodies to each other and the chosen close-quarter prop. The only bad thing about these numbers is that we only get four of them and all together they probably run less than ten minutes within a three hour film. The remainder of the movie is enjoyable in the lazy way the best of Rivette can pull off. And not one fucking actor participates in an acting workshop the entire time. How nice to be reminded again that I can like Rivette. Recommended.
Jeanne et le Garçon formidable (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau 1998)
Promiscuous Virginie Ledoyen falls for Mathieu Demy, who’s dying of AIDS, in this grossly ill-conceived musical. Demy conceals his illness from Ledoyen until after they’ve slept together, and she is
totally fine with this. At no point does anyone in the film consider this a conversation that should have been held before they slept with each other. The film plays at tackling big issues, as in its opening number with an immigrant custodial staff singing and dancing about how they’ll never be French citizens, but the film quickly follows this up with a ching-chong Asian joke, so, uh, let’s chuck those progressive bonus points out the window immediately. I hated the main character and how the film indulged her, I thought the Demy riffs (two characters are constantly missing a crucial piece of information about a shared third party, and for no reason) were lame and uninsightful, and I found the music… okay, if unimaginatively staged in performance (as seems to be the standard in these modern musicals).
On connaît la chanson (Alain Resnais 1997)
Resnais’ usual suspects gather for a romantic comedy in which characters sporadically break out into song. So, a musical, but here everyone just lip-syncs to recordings of French pop songs that last anywhere from five to thirty seconds. The gag here is that the songs are not gender-matched, and indeed the first joke of the film is a flashback to a Nazi officer singing along to Josephine Baker. As a rom com, this isn’t half bad— the characters are standard-issue, but the performers are all game. As a musical, I have some larger issues, as I could never tell what the film was going for in its gimmick. Is this a commentary on how pop songs, like quotes from movies and TV shows, stay with us and provide us guidance in our real lives? Is it an ironic distancing tool to make the conventions of the musical ordinary and unadorned by making them conversational and without dance or presentational obfuscation? The title means “We know the song,” and there is a clear “Aha” factor being played with in the often unexpected choices. One problem: I’m American and have no prior exposure to nearly all of these songs, so there is an unsurpassable obstacle for me “getting” this one on the level it operated on for French audiences on first release (it was, indeed, hugely popular and was by far Resnais’ highest grossing film) by not being able to recognize the baggage many of the song choices carry. As a weird kind of Dennis Potter-esque jukebox musical variation, it’s interesting, but I feel like it’s a movie I may never be able to meet on its referential level. But it has the rare distinction of being one of the few post-
Muriel Resnais films I didn’t hate, so there’s that.
I did not realize beforehand that co-stars here Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri not only wrote this film, but also Resnais’ hideous
Smoking / No Smoking two-hander (which they of course did not star in). Interesting that they parlayed their success at screenwriting these and
Un air de famille into a series of films written by and starring the two and directed by Jaoui, the most famous of which being the Cesar-winning and Oscar-nommed
Le Goût des autres.
Robin and His Seven Hoods (Gordon Douglas 1964)
Frequently inept filmmaking abounds in this gangster-era Robin Hood update. For instance, the entire introduction of the Robin Hood theme doesn’t even come til halfway through the movie, and out of nowhere based on a tossed-off side plot. Frank Sinatra and some of his fellow Rat Pack cronies are hoods who want to do good, and Peter Falk is their opponent, a hood who wants to do bad (and seems content to merely phone in his perf from
A Pocketful of Miracles, though here as there he’s the best thing about the film). And Barbara Rush has a weird running joke concerning her seduction tactics that almost works. The musical numbers, written by Nelson Riddle, are almost uniformly awful, though Sammy Davis Jr at least gets a catchy if unconvincing ode to guns that gains a new level of cognitive dissonance when paired with Davis’ effeminate performance style.
Szép leányok, ne sírjatok! (Márta Mészáros 1970)
Jaroslava Schallerová from
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is engaged to one boy but runs off with another in this slim narrative that primarily exists so that the film can play countless tracks of Hungarian psych rock and “beat” music over the action. The film reminded me of the later
No One Knows About Persian Cats in the way it blends performances into the narrative and focuses primarily on the music, not the plot. While the music is great, the film itself isn’t particularly good. My advice? Run it in the background and don’t bother trying to follow along.
That Night in Rio (Irving Cummings 1941)
Two Don Ameches, one Carmen Miranda, one Alice Faye, one (underplaying!) SZ “Cuddles” Sakall, a couple forgettable numbers, and a few silly scenes of mistaken identity make for one forgettable movie musical.
Thoroughly Modern Millie (George Roy Hill 1967)
Hard to believe a musical centered around white slavery is a failure, but if you find the idea of a cabal of Evil Asians conspiring to continually drug and kidnap Mary Tyler Moore for sale into prostitution hilarious, man, you are in luck! This Jazz Age mistake is dragged down by lousy numbers, many of which aren’t even sung diagetically (they are instead sung in voice-over, because this is one of those musicals that is embarrassed to be a musical), and a broad, unfunny central performance by Julie Andrews, who here even before
SOB is subject to a barrage of lame breast jokes for no known reason.
