1983 ‘Les années 80’ Directed by Chantal Akerman
All of the time and effort put forth to stage a musical is chronicled here in this bright and funny French outing. The story is set at a shopping mall where people audition for an upcoming show. Afterwards, they are seen going through the grueling routines of learning the music and rehearsing.
As I watched this, I thought Akerman was somewhat mocking the musical she was creating, but everything I have read suggest this was a more earnest endeavor. In that light, it's an interesting insight into the process, watching her direct aspiring actresses and actors as they attempt the dialogue of the scene, as they sing and dance in preparation. If I was right, it's a light roasting of typical romantic tropes of musicals and similar absurd romances.
Either way, it's built almost like a fugue, with subtle variations following each other during the auditioning process, and the coaching of each actor, when there is coaching at all, is off-camera direction that demands nuances that are sometimes barely noticeable. Other sequences…
This docu/musical by Chantal Akerman had me as soon as I saw...
Yvon Vromman of The Honeymoon Killers:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL7-5o6xMvQ
Like seeing the image of a ghost that only your ears remembered.
I know that Chantal Akerman is a good filmmaker. I also know there's a lot that's well made about her films. But I find them to be so didacticly boring that I could not care in the slightest. I feel like I know what her films are about in the first few minutes, and then she proceeds to make that same point over and over and over again.
No films tangibly capture the everyday like Akerman's do (or at least that's what Jonathan Rosenbaum argues in his appreciation of her). I'm just not sure that's a worthy goal or that it's a goal that needs to be repeated over and over again.
The final act of this film switches things…
I keep thinking about Chantal conducting the singer with joyous abandon, her passion uncontainable, enwrapping them both in a dance, all of us in a dance. This is an alternative model of the director: no megaphone, no revolver, no chair, no crane. Of course it is Akerman who both shows us the invisible labour of direction and remakes it into women's glorious work.
It took me a while to get into this, but after a while something clicked with me about this movie, and not only did I enjoy the movie from there on, I understood and appreciated the more slower moments in the beginning. I think the closest to "Jeanne Dielman" Chantal has gotten in terms of showing the same routine and focusing on the little, subtle differences. Except here, it's about different actors performing the same routine under Akerman's direction. There's something wonderful about watching a series of actors being told to show excitement and then disappointment as the person they long for offscreen doesn't approach them. After a while, you start to notice the craft of acting rather than the emotional impact it's supposed to have on you. It almost kind of reminds me of Jacques Tati's "Playtime" where it looks like random chaos, but is actually very choreographed, and that becomes clearer and clearer as the film goes on.
So there's this musical, and we see a scene from it - cute, well staged, catchy song, lots of colours.
Well, we see it after about an hour, that is. The first hour is repeated repetitions of repeated repetitions, being repeated, and repeated. Some of the bits being repeated clearly belong to the final scene, other things appear arbitrarily detached - though we may assume these bits repeated are part of the "musical" (which is technically never there) we're literary watching god knows what.
I'd call this movie overly flimsy (and it is, but) had it not been for how obstinate and devoted Akerman is to her impulses, while at the same time having the kindness to remain modest. One…
In the last film I reviewed I noted that it seemed to avoid all the melodramatic catharsis its familiar plot suggested, but with this film, presented as notes towards the staging of a musical, all we get for much of the running time is melodramatic highlights without the context of a plot. Actors rehearse their lines, prompted by a (largely offscreen) director Akerman to find different intonations and inflections. There are fragments of choreography, actors (who aren't natural singers) recording their songs. It could be boring -- certainly many have found it to be -- but it has a playful quality. This would become Akerman's 1986 film Window Shopping, a relatively straightforward musical, but this earlier series of sketches has its own appeal.
March Around the World 2017 #4/30 (Belgium)
I keep thinking about Chantal conducting the singer with joyous abandon, her passion uncontainable, enwrapping them both in a dance, all of us in a dance. This is an alternative model of the director: no megaphone, no revolver, no chair, no crane. Of course it is Akerman who both shows us the invisible labour of direction and remakes it into women's glorious work.
It took me a while to get into this, but after a while something clicked with me about this movie, and not only did I enjoy the movie from there on, I understood and appreciated the more slower moments in the beginning. I think the closest to "Jeanne Dielman" Chantal has gotten in terms of showing the same routine and focusing on the little, subtle differences. Except here, it's about different actors performing the same routine under Akerman's direction. There's something wonderful about watching a series of actors being told to show excitement and then disappointment as the person they long for offscreen doesn't approach them. After a while, you start to notice the craft of acting rather than the emotional impact it's supposed to have on you. It almost kind of reminds me of Jacques Tati's "Playtime" where it looks like random chaos, but is actually very choreographed, and that becomes clearer and clearer as the film goes on.
An over boring (at least not also over long, just about 82 minutes) Chantal Akerman experimental effort, featuring repeated dress rehearsals of casting, script reading, recording, acting and dancing, representing a prelude to an ending segment staging a hypothetical completed movie's musical sequence
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