|
We all need a little break from reality now and then.
Movies traditionally provide such escape, and no genre is more escapist
than the musical, where spectacular song and dance numbers offer
respite from the rest of the film. More than plot or character development,
it is this balance of the quotidian and the fantastic that propels
a musical.
So, it's not surprising that Anything But Love,
touted as a "new musical romance for the 21st century,"
has a hackneyed plot and one-dimensional characters. After all,
classic Hollywood musicals like Singin' in the Rain and
Guys and Dolls have simple story lines and cartoonish characters.
But they also possess a few important elements that Anything
But Love is sorely missing: music, for one, and good writing,
and, that ineffable "magic."
Anything But Love is the story of Billie
Golden (Isabel Rose), an aspiring cabaret singer obsessed with the
Golden Age of Hollywood. She's serenading senior citizens in an
airport bar and living at home with her alcoholic mother (Alix Korey)
when she runs into Greg Ellenbogen (Cameron Bancroft), an old high
school crush who is now a wealthy corporate lawyer. A predictable
love triangle ensues when she begins taking piano lessons from Elliot
Shepard (Andrew McCarthy, in the film's most appealing performance
-- imagine that!), a cranky, tortured artist who encourages her
to "find herself" through music. You can probably guess
what happens next.
For a musical about a musician, the film is oddly
unmusical. That usual seesaw between the talking parts and the singing/dancing
parts is almost non-existent. Anything But Love features
only three "fantasy" musical sequences, only one of which
-- a makeover scene -- even comes close to re-creating the snappy,
glittering charm of a vintage musical. Most of the music is built
into the storyline in rather lackluster on-stage performances; Eartha
Kitt's all-too-brief cabaret number is the sole bright spot.
The dearth of full-on musical numbers in Anything
But Love means that it relies more heavily on "the talking
parts," which sadly, range from clichéd to clunky. Rose's
portrayal of Billie is earnest, if a bit flat; she's too subdued
to support the quirkiness of Billie's vintage dresses and anachronistic
hairdos. As Greg, Bancroft takes his one-dimensional character a
little too literally, imbuing him with all the charm of a cardboard
box. And despite the fact that Andrew McCarthy still does the best
"I'm madly in love with you" stare in the business, even
he can't achieve the necessary charisma to make us want to believe
in true love, and then take us along for the ride.
It's not surprising then, that the film's most effective
sequence involves neither musical performance nor dialogue. It's
a montage of scenes (set to music) narrating the growing familiarity
and affection between Billie and Elliott. Heads bent together at
a piano, perched above the pre-September 11th skyline in a spacious
white studio, for those scant seconds they inhabit a world apart
from the rest of the film. Although itself a cliché, the
montage possesses a simplicity and unselfconsciousness that provides
a brief window on the charm and romance that the film so desperately
seeks to evoke.
Indeed, aspiration is the only thing Anything
But Love has plenty of. Dubbed the "anti-indie indie,"
one senses that if it had the means, it would be a retro Hollywood
blockbuster, à la 2002's Chicago. The fact that
it refuses to resort to irony or camp is refreshing. But unlike
indie films that wear their low-rent ingenuity on their sleeves,
it plays the wallflower, too ashamed of its shabby dress to sashay
into the light. As a result, it evokes not the heyday of Hollywood
musicals so much as a heartfelt, but frustrated desire to emulate
them.
In one musical number, Greg recognizes Billie in a
hotel bar and follows her into an empty ballroom where she stands
alone in a spotlight, lost in reverie. As they renew their acquaintance,
the conversation snaps into a dance. It's Billie's fantasy: a swooning,
swelling, today-my-prince-has-come celebration, but the camera work
feels self-conscious, too concerned with hiding what appears to
be a lack of dancing skill. After some leaden ballroom moves, Billie
dances away from Greg, into the background, her movement partially
obscured behind columns. In the foreground we see only the back
of Greg's head as he tracks her progress around the room. The scene
ends abruptly with her posing on a balcony while he gazes up at
her. Instead of turning the actors loose -- even as poor dancers,
they might have mustered a sense of connection -- the scene substitutes
awkward choreography and cinematography that prevent us from fully
entering into Billie's fantasy world. Neither a touching, intimate
moment, nor a large-scale spectacle, the scene feels clipped and
tentative, a sensation that recurs throughout the film as it continually
reins itself in just short of delight.
Anything But Love is so concerned with reproducing
the style of the archetypal musical that it neglects the
basic human emotions that anchor it. It seems to think that by merely
referring to a swoon, it can make the audience feel it, too. Lacking
the means to produce a truly opulent and distracting spectacle,
and failing to tug on the more affordable heartstrings, Anything
But Love occupies an in between space that is unsatisfying
on both counts.
It's tempting to conclude that a bigger budget and
a little more glitz would have made all the difference, but Dancer
in the Dark (2000), also a musical about a woman fascinated
with Hollywood musicals, proves otherwise. Selma (Björk) uses
music to temper the drudgery of her factory job and the knowledge
that she will soon be too blind to work. In a fantasy factory scene,
machine sounds coalesce into a rhythm that goads the workers into
an ecstatic, celebratory song and dance number. The grittiness of
the factory floor and the workers' garb remains the same, but the
pure joy of their performance shines through the drab setting, throwing
into high relief the fact that the sequence is fully a figment of
Selma's imagination. Shot on digital video, Dancer in the Dark
is a low-budget, contemporary musical that is not only unafraid
to be a musical, it transforms the genre, injecting it
with documentary-style realism and heightened emotional impact.
The musical sequences in Dancer in the Dark
take us out of ourselves for a moment and then plop us right back
down into the most heart wrenching of stories, with hardly any fanfare.
Music is both escape from and part of everyday life, providing both
comfort and catharsis. Anything But Love gestures towards
this undulation of fantasy and reality, but ultimately leaves us
yearning for an intensity, musical or otherwise, that never quite
arrives.
< back to film
|
