🦋 Shut up and dance
Ellen and I went to see Comme Toujours Here I Stand last night, and had a good time. It is a fun show, though without being a masterpiece or a great work of art -- I may have gone in hoping a bit for a masterpiece based on the Cléo de 5 à 7 connection... What seemed to me like the big limitation of the show, what kept it from being great, was that although it was billed as a dance production, and the players were dancers, there was a lot of time spent on dialog, when they were not moving. The dialog was OK -- some of it was taken directly from the movie, some of it was funny twists on what was in the movie... but the players were not actors, and their delivery of dialog left a lot to be desired -- I would much rather be watching them move. The show's conceit was fun and self-referential -- rather than trying to do a straight remake of the movie, the narrative was of a group of film students or art students trying to create a work of art derivative from the movie. The woman who was playing Cléo was also supposed to be the director of the piece, and she was portrayed as a narcissistic prima donna, and there was a lot of broad humor about her being difficult to work with; I thought this worked pretty well, Ellen thought some of it got old. When they did shut up and dance, they were gorgeous -- and maybe the very best bit of the show was the interplay between the director's need to be in charge and the movement of the dance -- there were complex bits where she would criticize another player while they were dancing, stop, rewind, take 2... They could have pruned the dialog quite a bit and still gotten their storyline across, and there would have been room for a lot more dancing.
posted morning of Saturday, October 10th, 2009
➳ More posts about Cléo from 5 to 7
➳ More posts about Agnès Varda
➳ More posts about The Movies
|
Herta Müller 