ONCE (John Carney, 2007)

John Carney’s Irish Once is a much more conventional musical film than we’ve been led to believe; it’s clever that Carney has called it “an art-house musical film,” but, generically, what the difference is between it and twentieth-century MGM musicals is impossible for me to determine. The fact that the film is shot in real-life locations, not sets, is irrelevant since Carney does everything he can to shoot these locations as though they were sets.
     Although it thins out, the film is lovely for a spell, and certainly Glen Hansard’s music—Hansard also stars, as a Dublin busker who befriends a Czech immigrant—is gorgeous: pop/rock drawing its ache from a traditional Irish folk sound. However, everything that has to do with The Guy’s girlfriend, including flashbacks and the film’s ending, is dreadful. On the other hand, the father-son farewell is poignant.
     Once is an okay film that’s worth a look. Once. It’s worth a listen-to, though, more times than that.

GINGER AND FRED (Federico Fellini, 1986)

There are films by Federico Fellini that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy (8½, for instance); but Ginger and Fred, about a dance team reunited for a Christmastime television special after a thirty years’ separation, is wonderfully entertaining and deeply affecting. Compounding its rich nostalgia is the casting of the two lead roles: Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife, as “Ginger”; Marcello Mastroianni, Fellini’s longtime onscreen alter ego, as “Fred.”
     Apart from the act, ”Ginger” is Amelia Bonetti; “Fred,” Pippo Botticella.
     Their dance steps on the televised stage more or less creak; but the two are dressed in silken charm and lit with humanity. Of course, the actual lights all go out just as “Ginger and Fred” start their routine, and the two consider crawling away. “We’re phantoms,” Pippo whispers to Amelia; “We rise from the darkness and vanish.” The lights do return, and Pippo embarrassingly falls down, but, professionally persevering, the couple complete their modest routine.
     Fellini’s glowing film looks back but is also alert to what’s going on in the present. It spiritedly rakes over Italian pop commercialism. Billboards and television commercials reek of bad taste and ridiculousness. Backstage at the show, a girl sticks out her rump as the inventor of the panties adorning it pontificates on his product: aromatic, edible panties “in eleven fruit flavors, plus tuna and onion.” The team of Ginger and Fred represents the humanity that this sort of commercial dehumanization has replaced. Indeed, the TV special itself is a cheesy affair, and the celebrity who follows the pair onstage is an even older soul than our dual protagonists. The past is being trotted out with little appreciation and even some derision; but at least some audiences—we—respond very differently. Warmly.
     Masina is heavenly; Mastroianni, brilliantly funny.

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LOLA (Jacques Demy, 1960)

With a tip of the hat to Marlene Dietrich’s character in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), Anouk Aimée dazzles as Cécile, a dancer who goes by the name of Lola at work, where she entertains American G.I.s, in Jacques Demy’s first feature and enduring black-and-white masterpiece, Lola. Nervously breathless, this Lola is like a tremulous shadow flickering as gorgeous light across the screen; the essence of her presence is that Lola seems perpetually poised to take her leave.
     Seven years earlier Michel, the love of her life, abandoned Cécile without explanation; she has sex with a sailor who reminds her of him. Frankie, headed home to Chicago, thinks he is in love with Lola, who crosses paths with out-of-work childhood friend Roland, who is definitely in love with her. But Lola’s heart belongs to Michel.
     The action unfolds in Nantes, whose streets and structures contribute—pardon the oxymoron—a dreamy realism to what critic Roy Armes has aptly called “a gay, lighthearted work, a sort of musical without songs and dances.” Indeed, Demy has fashioned a musical film, one that is richly scored by Michel Legrand (and there is one sung song, and another melody that in the States is sung as “Watch What Happens”), and that has dancing around the edges. In anticipation of Demy’s other masterpiece, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), the dialogue seems poised in the direction of being sung. At film’s end, coincidentally, three characters are headed to Cherbourg.
     Characters keep running in to one another, have “doubles” that constantly remind others of them and of heartache.
     Lola’s gaiety seems to encapsulate the comedy of human behavior, the ways in which we cope with longing, loss and practical responsibilities; it is the mask we wear amidst the tragedy of life.

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