dMYD
Starring Blissful Silence
Y
A girl called Lizzie Grant brought out an album this week and everyone was upset that it wasn’t a masterpiece. For months and months across a landfill of paragraphs critics and nerds and cultural people had decided that she was a hot new relic, a shining big-lipped mannequin of classic Hollywood glamour and old-school reliable talent; lungs, legs, eyelashes and, crucially, the greatest song of last year and maybe the whole millennium in Video Games, a slice of fried gold. They were disappointed. The album wasn’t a ‘masterpiece’, it wasn’t a ‘work of art’. Like most of her forebears in the crooning industry she’d simply released a set of songs, some good, some bad and some great, not as a timeless monument for the ages but as the same thing that had been done all those years ago when singers were finding their keys and throwing songs together. It was simple. It was enjoyable. But nowadays that isn’t enough. Except if you’re a daringly nostalgic French romance film shot through with more joie-de-vivre than a pack of lemurs firing cherry gobstoppers out of their mouths whilst singing the collected works of Brian Wilson. Then you get called a masterpiece. The Artist isn’t one really, but it doesn’t have to be, and it might be something better.
80% wonderful nostalgia to 20% genuinely incredible film, the movie’s strength lies in its enforced limitations; by taking speech out of the equation every frame has to have a reason for being, from moving the plot along to a visual pun to a dog doing something delightful. It’s a marked contrast to the water-treading that inhabits so much of Hollywood today, seas of endless exposition and men in suits sat in rooms mumbling or demanding to ‘get the president on the line, wasted time for wasted money. The silence jacks up the quality of everything involved, from the physicality of the actors to the old-timey cinematography to the pure, gurn-inciting beauty of Berenice Bejo, given a case of the Garbos by never having her make a sound. The movie’s concessions to the modern day are its weak points; though initially bemusing, the bits where it makes fun of its own silence take you out of the essential simplicity of the story, which is already performing the miracle of keeping a theatre full of people with smartphones quiet for an hour and a half all by itself. Unlike many it’s thirties forebears it’s a circular effort, commenting on Hollywood and films itself rather than women getting taped to train tracks or people falling into frozen lakes; make no mistake that this is a novelty film, and anyone who attempts to follow it up with a Hugh Grant vehicle devoid of speech or, god-forbid, a Friedberg and Seltzer SILENT MOVIE should get legions of lesions and be made to watch Legion.
Not a masterpiece then, but something simpler and more enjoyable. Before art got involved and everyone had to be striving towards something unobtainable movies were there to charm and entertain, to while away a Friday night far from your abusive spouse or dead dog or dentally-challenged in-laws. They still are – witness the hordes that flock to the latest Ryan Reynolds-face-a-thon or dumbo Statham gun-run-funner.The Artist has been heralded as masterpiece because what was old is new again, because we’ve forgotten how to tell simple, entertaining stories with any form of restraint. And that’s launched it into the realms of the critics rather than the hearts of the audience, and that’s a bit of a crime. A wonderful movie, an exercise in love, and wonder and entertainment, but not a masterpiece. It doesn’t have to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment