Master Class: Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”

I live in a rainy city. Even today, after a week of perfect sun that seemed to serve as a prelude to summer, the skies opened and I found myself digging out my rain coat again. That’s what happens when you live in a port city. And with the closure of this year’s Cannes Film Festival on my mind, with a French film victorious, there was no better time to see Jacques Demy’s classic 1964 film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

On the surface, this seemed like a simple love story when I first saw it years ago. The young man, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) is in love with 17-year-old Genevieve (the luminous living legend Catherine Deneuve, in her breakthrough role). He’s a mechanic who dreams of opening his own garage. She works for her mother in the town’s only umbrella boutique, which is on the verge of financial ruin. They talk of marriage, although her mother disapproves (he has only a sickly godmother, thus completing the familial economics of the story). Figurative dark clouds appear overhead in addition to the rains: the Algerian War is raging several hundred miles away, and he must serve. “I will wait for you”, she sings to him, repeating “je t’aimes, je t’aime, je t’aimes” repeatedly as his train takes him away. While Guy’s away, a wealthy jeweler has his eye on Catherine, and the separation and other circumstances conspire to keep the young lovers away for good. I haven’t even mentioned that the whole has nary a line of spoken dialogue, as everything is sung beginning to end, and it finishes in a lightning-fast 90 minutes.

Few films dared, even musical ones, to become full-scale operettas where every word was expressed in song. Even the most famous of musicals had great dialogue and witty exchanges. Not so in Demy’s enduring love story. Demy had the incredulous notion that the whole thing would be sung, and he was fortunate to find a supportive producer who saw his vision completed. The film was a smash in Paris, claimed the Palme d’Or at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival, and proceeded to storm the world, culminating in global success, a Grammy nomination for the soundtrack, several Academy Award nominations and an invitation for Demy to live and work in the United States, which he happily accepted. And yet Cherbourg remains his most revered masterwork. Why is this?

The secret lies in the film’s simple structure: a boy and a girl in love, torn apart by life circumstances and choices, but not by plot machinations or something as convenient as deus ex machina. When Demy collaborated with Michel Legrand for the film’s now-famed score, they stuck so faithfully to the idea of a three-hanky-weeper that they wrote at which points in the film each of the three figurative hankies should actually be taken out. The operetta format elevates how we see and experience young love for the first time, when everything in life tastes, smells, feels and sounds that much better. There is nothing else in the world but love. Emotions are heightened and never stop, even when the emotions swell and contract, for better or for worse, and Demy understands this. The music, while constant, doesn’t come at your relentlessly. Instead, it is as gentle as the tide, ebbing and flowing, but it never stops. It may have a sweeping orchestral suite throughout, but it’s also heavily jazz-influenced. Regardless, the two genres make compliment each other seamlessly. This is a seemingly small charmer of a film that grows into a grand masterpiece and reminds you of how you felt in that first brush of true love, and how heartbreaking it is when it doesn’t work out. The film’s coda, which I won’t give away, gives closure, is almost unbearably cruel, but also accepting of the hard choices we make in life, without judgment.

Cherbourg was filmed in eye-popping gorgeous colour schemes. The town feels just a bit more lived-in than most film musicals of the era. You could sense that people actually lived there and that it wasn’t just a film set. Demy knows that such a simple touch made the film connect that much more to the audience: this could happen to even the most uncomplicated people you know, and it’s a complete heartbreaker when life intrudes. There’s an expression that God likes having a laugh when people make plans for the future. While religion doesn’t figure heavily in Cherbourg, one is reminded that compromise and making do are what shapes our experiences and makes us into the people we are. The film’s final scene, when Guy and Genevieve meet under circumstances more complicated than they are, is a coup de grace of such delicate balance that if the emotions were glass, they’d be smashed to smithereens.

Who says life is simple? It’s not, and you must be prepared for any circumstance. That’s what life in Cherbourg is like, just as it is in my city. In both cases, carry an umbrella, just in case. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is available in glorious DVD and Blu-Ray. Watch it with a box of Kleenex. This is one weeper that earns its tears honestly.

Cinematically Inclined: “Nine”

Sometimes, you hear about a film project and it’s an absolute dream. You line up a prestigious director, decorated cast consisting of award-winning actors, throw it a big budget and slot it for a prestigious holiday release, in anticipation of big box office and critical hosannas translating into a slew of show-business awards. And then sometimes it goes terribly wrong.

In 2008, plans were finalized for the film version of the Best Musical Tony Award-winning play Nine. It seemed to be a natural fit for a film project. The original musical was based on Federico Fellini’s classic movie 8 ½. One of the plays the original musical beat for the Tony, Dreamgirls, was adapted into a highly successful film version in 2006. Nine was meant to join the burgeoning renaissance of movie musicals, which includes not only Dreamgirls but also Moulin Rouge!, Hairspray, the Best Picture Oscar winner Chicago and Mamma Mia!, which became the highest-grossing film of all time in the UK. Nine’s glorious cast included Oscar winners Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Dame Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman and Sophia Loren, plus nominee Kate Hudson and Grammy-winning singer-rapper Fergie. The project was helmed by Rob Marshall, who shepherded Chicago to roaring success. It had the backing of The Weinstein Company, with an incredible track record of box office and Oscar winners dating back to 1992. And a sensational trailer that debuted at Cannes amidst a flurry of publicity to exhibitors and ecstatic advance word:

So why did the project fail? One could easily blame the intense box office competition at the time the film went into wide release. The blockbuster Avatar appealed to all demographics and became a cultural event, and the reboot of Sherlock Holmes, it could be argued, had siphoned the more mature audience that was meant for the sophisticated Nine. One might make the case that its failure was also owed to Up in the Air, the acclaimed dramedy that was also attracting the same crowd. Had an overabundance of films aimed at the same demographic cannibalized the audience? Sure, you could have argued that, but how does that explain why the film received mixed to dismal reviews? I was absolutely ecstatic to see the trailer in the spring of 2009, but the final project felt underwhelming when I finally caught it at a New Year’s Day matinee performance. It wasn’t from distaste for the genre, either, so that argument was out.

A word on the marginal plot, taken directly from Fellini’s original 1963 film. Movie director Guido (Day-Lewis) has director’s block and is working on his latest project following a nervous breakdown. He has no script and no confirmed cast, only a leading lady (Kidman) and some sets. His loyal costume designer (Dench) has been working with him forever and wants him to do something about his procrastination. Heck, the whole movie is two hours of procrastination, set to music. He’s been cheating on his wife (Cotillard) with longtime mistress Carla (Cruz), and both come to the town where he’s filming the movie. An American journalist (Hudson) has started asking uncomfortable questions (he’s hiding his recent meltdown from the press). His mother (Loren) figures in his imagination, as does the town whore (Fergie) who introduced him to the mystique of the female gender in his boyhood. Nine concerns whether his wife ultimately wises up and leaves him, and whether or not the film is made. Neither question’s answer is at all consequential.

Road Show: Les Misérables

“You only get one cry in life, you’ve chosen well!” – Rip Torn to Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock, upon giving his character a promotion.

Original Broadway poster

Far too many people cry at too much trash disguised as “art”. The Blogger knows people who cry at Twilight, Britney Spears concerts and Jackie Collins novels. Too bad these people have such terrible taste. The Blogger has been known to cry at only one book, film and play in his life. These are, respectively, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking, and the musical of Les Misérables, or “Les Mis”, as he and millions of others affectionately call it.

Dubbed “the world’s favourite musical”, Les Mis was first performed in France in 1980 and premiered in London’s West End in 1985. The original French score was performed by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, with an English language libretto produced by Herbert Kretzmer. Twenty-six years after its debut, the musical has yet to close and still plays eight performances a week. Such a feat for a long-running show is completely unheard of. The Broadway production, despite some initially mixed critical response, cleared the board at the 1987 Tony Awards and played for sixteen years in New York, with a successful revival less than three years after its closing. The libretto has been translated into 21 languages and performed over the last quarter-century in 38 countries, including Germany, South Korea, Chile, Japan, Argentina, the Netherlands, Israel, Sweden, Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Mexico, Hungary, Poland and Spain.

Colm Wilkinson, the original
Jean Valjean

Les Mis is no small production. The score demands two dozen major and featured parts. It has been greatly reduced from the original 1,400 page novel by Victor Hugo and yet performances may still run close to three hours. Set over several decades in post-revolutionary France, the main narrative thread concentrates on Jean Valjean, a man who served nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread for his starving family. This role is one of the most challenging in Broadway history and requires an operatic vocal mastery (it is often played by trained tenors). Upon release, Valjean is hounded by police inspector Javert, a man so relentless in pursuing Valjean over the decades that he’s essentially the world’s most inexhaustible parole officer. Valjean becomes a successful businessman who adopts Cosette, the impoverished daughter of the fragile prostitute Fantine. Fantine’s character is best known for singing “I Dreamed a Dream”, a now-iconic Broadway standard known popularly as Susan Boyle’s audition song for X Factor. Cosette was plucked from the brothel-owning Thenadier family, whose daughter Eponine grows up to fall in love with Marius, Cosette’s beloved. Marius’s school chums are at the forefront of the Paris Uprising of 1832, an insurrection at which thousands of rebellious, ill-equipped universe students who never held a gun in their lives were massacred. Through all this, fortunes are made and lost, the population starves and die, characters somehow survive and carry on through their hard lives together.

Lea Salonga as Fantine in the 2006 Broadway revival

Unlike most musicals, there are no dance numbers here. The musical has proven to be a draw for top musical talent over the decades, as roles have been performed by revered Broadway stars such as Colm Wilkinson, Patti LuPone, Alfie Boe and Lea Salonga. Other stars who have taken roles in various productions throughout the years and in the world include Matt Lucas, Deborah (formerly Debbie) Gibson, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Ruthie Henshall, Nick Jonas and Lea Michele. I personally know several people who each own several cast recordings produced over the last two and a half decades. In a British nationwide poll, the listeners of BBC Radio Two chose Les Mis as “The Nation’s Most Popular Musical”.

Road Show: Wicked in Vancouver & Western Canada

Update: ticket information for Wicked in Calgary and Edmonton is now available. The show stops in Calgary from June 29 to July 17, and in Edmonton from July 20 to August 7.

The Blogger never fell in love with The Wizard of Oz. I’m not certain if it was the product of my immigrant upbringing, a complete lack of interest in the film as a child, or a total unawareness of what it means to so many others that allowed it to pass me by. I didn’t even see the actual film until after I turned 30, although by the time I saw it, so many people had told me what happens in it years before that I knew the entire story before viewing it and felt that I had already seen it.

Strangely enough, my trip to Oz was presaged by a reading of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a revisionist novel from the same source material. Turning the story on its head, the novel charts the Wicked Witch of the West’s history, including her tortured birth and her time at Shiz University, where she meets Glinda the Good Witch (then named Galinda) and they become unlikely friends. Also, Maguire gives her the name Elphaba. It turns out that the Wizard was not so wonderful. Enchanted, anthropomorphized animals integrated into society and, like humans, held down jobs and were highly educated.

The Wizard, in a form of ethnic cleansing, instigates a systemic eradication of these magical creatures and gives them lobotomies, thus robbing them of their faculties and higher functions. Elphaba, as a fierce defender of these creatures, watched helplessly as her favourite professor, an enchanted creature, was reduced to a shadow of his former self under the Wizard’s rule of law. Elphaba declared war on the Wizard and was thus named the Wicked Witch of the West, since she was only wicked to the Wizard and the citizens of Oz who fall under his rule. (Her sister was the Wicked Witch of the East, hardly a fair assessment given that she was herself confined to a wheelchair and seemed to be “wicked” purely by political affiliation and genealogy. Named Nessarose, she is a powerful politician in the novel and the musical.)

If The Wizard of Oz were a historical chronicle of the wars in that place and time, then it was a history written by the winners: the Wizard, the Munchkins, and the unwitting Dorothy, an opportunist who only used the Wizard to return to a barren hinterland. Wicked is a witty, sinister novel that tweaks with our notions of good and evil by asking critically, what is “good”? Does “evil” exist? Is either of these simply a moral or a philosophical concept signifying social values, or is there anything intrinsic in either? Do they only have value in relation to one another and, when you remove that contrast, is there nothing left but a series of categorical imperatives? How do you assign value to a life?  Maguire’s text gives dignity to Elphaba’s story.

Modern Film Classics: Moulin Rouge!

There’s a famous anecdote of the first-ever performance of Ravel’s Bolero. This classical piece is comprised of the same syncopated rhythms, played over and over again, with increased ferocity and with gradually more instruments, before culminating in a fiery climax, after which the audience had heard the same few bars of music played repeatedly for fifteen minutes. At the end of the performance, an outraged audience member furiously told the composer, Ravel himself, “Sir, you are mad!” To this, the composer responded, “Madam, you have understood the piece!”

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the release of The Blogger’s all-time favourite film, Baz Luhrmann’s mercurial Moulin Rouge!

 

When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as the opening night film at a pull-out-all-the-stops premiere, the film was like no other film on the market. Boasting dizzying, hyperkinetic editing and soaring camerawork applied to the then-defunct musical film genre, Moulin Rouge! expanded Luhrmann’s dazzling aesthetic vision from previous works and applied it to a big-budget, go-for-broke artistic extravaganza. It was such a bold directorial statement that even its title was so emphatic that it required an exclamation point. Luhrmann didn’t set out to create a landmark, influential film when he embarked on the lengthy twelve-month shoot. Given that it was the third entry in his “Red Curtain” trilogy of films, based on the aesthetic of heightened theatricality applied to film, one should have expected that this film was loaded to excess. In other words, since it’s his magnum opus and signature piece, people were not prepared for their immediate reaction after they saw the film. I still have knock-down, angry debates with people who truly, madly, passionately despise this movie.

This is not to say that Luhrmann was self-indulgent for the sake of getting off on his own artistic fetishes. He knew that he had to obtain funding for the work and drew no less than Nicole Kidman, in one of her most luminous performances, to show off her heretofore unknown musical skills. In the central role, Ewan McGregor is all over this film, almost never off-screen and narrating it. With no original film score for his musical, Luhrmann decided to deconstruct some of the most popular songs of the previous three decades, stuff them into a soundboard, and remixed the hell out of them all. From Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the film’s smash “Lady Marmalade” cover, nothing is too good to ravish and put into the mix. The overall visceral reaction was nothing less than a period piece set in 1900 transported to 2000. One end of the millennium meets the other. The dates are not accidental.

A Gay Old Time: Vancouver Men's Chorus Spring Concert

The Artful Blogger is a sucker for a song and a dance, preferably together. He didn’t have a high school glee club to join (it must be an American thing) and he never had the gift of song, so he must live vicariously through others. In particular, he only wishes that there could have been a chorus like the Warblers on Glee to have joined.

This is why the Blogger is very much looking forward to the Vancouver Men’s Chorus upcoming series of spring concerts. “Duets: Two Fabulous!” is exactly as it sounds: a series of duets starring talented and vocally inclined Vancouver men. The concept of this year’s show is duets performed by the Chorus and another local vocal group known as Pandora’s Vox. For the Glee fan within, this is a bit like watching two hours of dream duets between New Directions and the Warblers.

The Chorus is a non-profit group that showcases local gay and gay-friendly musical talent. They host a fall concert and a Christmas show, in addition to numerous events such as Big Gay Sing, World AIDS Day, AIDS Walk, outreach events, and Singing Can Be A Drag. The Blogger attended last year’s fall drag concert, where the “Telephone” duet was first performed by two intrepid members of the Chorus with copious amounts of glitter and suitable amounts of theatricality. The Chorus includes many of the Blogger’s personal friends, who have taken turns slaughtering him at karaoke night and making him look like the sad movie star warbling drunkenly in Lost in Translation. (Mercifully, the Blogger will not be allowed to castrate songs in front of a paying audience, not even as Yoko Ono in drag.)

Comedy Tonight!

Everyone, it seems, loves Stephen Sondheim: even lawyers.

Here in Vancouver, the legal profession gathers once a year to stage a charity event show for two local non-profit arts groups, the Carousel Theatre for Young People and the Touchstone Theatre. This is the annual Lawyer Show. While productions in the past had a legal slant, such as Witness for the Prosecution and Inherit the Wind, the lawyers have expanded their repertoire in the last few years: in fact, they performed Shakespeare for the last two years and by all accounts, the lawyers have a good deal of fun staging it, whether they were reciting soliloquies or merely carrying spears. 

This year’s play will prove to be the most high-risk yet, as the lawyer are staging their first musical. Based on Sondheim’s musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum shall continue to satisfy every lawyer’s need to unshackle the more stringent conventions attached to the profession and give them a chance to burst into song. There’s an old joke that all lawyers are at some level really failed actors with a need to command a stage, so the leap for litigators to tread the boards has somehow always been natural and organic.

The illustrious cast includes a number of leading practitioners and up-and-coming legal superstars. It also includes at least two trained theatre professionals. The feisty redhead in the picture above is the writer’s good friend Amanda Kemshaw, a litigator and former dancer trained in the style of Martha Graham. Also look out for Danielle Lemon, a sole practitioner in intellectual property law whose vocal stylistics can be heard on her MySpace page.

The show opens with the now-immortal “Comedy Tonight”, and indeed comedy is what one will get in this show. Forum boasts all the elements of classic force including mistaken identity, improbably situations, and a good deal of door-slamming. Since farce actively encourages transgressive behaviour, it may be one of the few times when the lawyers let loose with a few double entendres in mixed company and get away with it. Needless to say, from the writer has heard from former cast members of previous shows, everyone has a grand time performing, even if the lawyers are opposing counsel who have faced off in court before! There’s also the required elaborate chase scene at the end, where everyone is somehow resolved through bizarre plot machinations, deus ex machine, or as Shakespeare himself once wrote, “I don’t know; it’s a mystery”.

This year’s Lawyer Show plays nightly from May 4 to May 7 at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island. Click here for ticket information. Take note that the $75 ticket also includes a $45 tax receipt, since it’s a charity event. Thursday's performance even has an oyster bar after the show!


Bring everyone to the Forum, including and especially opposing counsel and actors who may one day wonder if they too could suffer the fate of leaving the theatre to become lawyers.

Hypersmash