The cinetrix's celluloid passions are often recondite; her swooning love of musicals being but one case in point. This morning, whilst showering under the watchful gaze of Janet Leigh [the 'Fesser's perverse humor at work], I was thinking about which musical number from all of cinematic history I would have most liked to have inhabited.
There are so many candidates: Audrey Hepburn's beatnik slink in Funny Face. Christopher Walken's wifebeater-clad menace tapdancing on the bar in Pennies from Heaven, Fred and Ginger in Swing Time whirling up those Art Deco stairs to "Never Gonna Dance" until their feet bled. Shirley MacLaine's heartbreaking vamp through "If My Friends Could See Me Now" in Sweet Charity. Donald O'Connor vaulting over the sofa in Singin' in the Rain. James Cagney as impressario George M. Cohan bringing down the house in Yankee Doodle Dandy. Shirley Temple and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson tapping down the stairs in The Littlest Rebel. Ewan McGregor jitterbugging in Lipstick on Your Collar. Robert Preston insinuating "Marion the Librarian" in The Music Man. Fosse and Berkeley and Robbins. Oh, my!
The cinetrix can't dance, can't act, can sing a little. But she still sometimes feels those surging emotions that Hollywood once determined were best expressed by bursting into spontaneous song and dance. What's a girl to do?
That's when I remembered Hal Hartley's earlier films. His characters were often tangled up in their own prolixity to the point of bursting. Words failed. The physical took over, often in a slap or a punch. But sometimes, people danced. I realized that Martin Donovan's silent dance number after Sofie [Mary Ward] kisses him in Surviving Desire comes closest to what Cinetrix: the Musical might look and sound like. There's melancholy. Wistfulness. Extreme self-consciousness. Hell, there's honest-to-god bricolage, even.
What about you?
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