The Spy in the Sandwich

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Thursday, July 30, 2020

10:00 AM | The Film Meme No. 96

[96th of 100]. The movie musical works with the most magic when it comes to the subject of love. Think about it: when you fall in love, your heart indeed feels like it's singing, and there's probably Puccini playing in your head. When lovers sing in movie musicals, the song seems like the best way to articulate what is often unexpressable. Consider, for example, Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer singing "Something Good" in The Sound of Music -- what an expression of surprise and delight at being loved! Consider the "Elephant Love Medley" in Moulin Rouge, which samples pop hits about love to become a negotiation at loving between Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor. Consider "Falling Slowly" in Once, which becomes a shorthand for the couple's doomed love affair. And so to have an entire film that's devoted to charting in the most musical way the highs, the lows, and the plateau of acceptance in a love affair? I'm there! And I was indeed "there" when I first saw this 1964 film by Jacques Demy. I was already a working professional in the early 2000s when I first decided to do a screening of it, with insistence from my friend Annabelle Adriano, who loves it. What took me so long? But it was not as if foreign films were easy to procure in the days before torrent. Plus its reputation scared me. What am I to make of a sung-through musical in French, captured in arresting Technicolor, and starring the heavenly pairing of Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo? Would I like it? I was scared that I might be repulsed by it. In hindsight, I worried too much, because I immediately fell in love with the first mise en scene, and the first note of the first song. And Deneuve and Castelnuovo sold the love story with such fierce conviction. Together they embodied with purity and with convincing chemistry the bond of two young people in love as they try to make their relationship work -- despite economic hardships and parental disapproval and the claws of current events. The boy is drafted to serve in the Algerian War, and his long absence changes things, as LDRs are wont to do. When he finally returns, she has long since gone, married off to a rich man -- until fate allows them a closure that reminds me of La La Land's: a genuine acceptance of what cannot be. And then, all throughout the film, the gorgeous music of Michel Legrand, especially the endlessly charming [and heartbreaking] "I Will Wait For You." I love and miss outsized musicals like this -- which is why when filmmakers today are brave to attempt its scale [as in La La Land or Les Chansons d'Amour], I'm willing to surrender my all to the effort. These are difficult films to make right, and Demy set the blueprint for how to make it legendary. What's the film?

For the introduction to this meme, read here.

Labels: film, love, music