Emilia Perez selected to represent France at the Oscars, Lady Gaga who sets music to Joker 2: the musical is infusing cinemas everywhere this fall, perhaps a return of hype for a long-sullied genre.
Is Joker: Folie à deux a musical? “I wouldn’t say it’s one strictly speaking,” Lady Gaga, who knows her way around musical films, said at the Venice Festival. A pop megastar who no longer has anything to prove on stage, she broke through on the big screen in Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born in 2018, where she played a singer.
In this new episode of The Joker, music is omnipresent in the couple that his character forms with the antihero played by Joaquin Phoenix. “We use music to really give the characters a way to express what they have to say, because going through dialogue is not enough,” she explained.
But unlike the canons of the genre, this film opts for a more natural rendering: the songs were sung live on set and Lady Gaga confided that she had “unlearned how to sing, forgotten how to breathe”. Imperfection must be felt – and is felt –
on screen.
Filmmaker Jacques Audiard also subverts the classics of the musical comedy in Emilia Perez, filmed to the sound of reggaeton and punctuated by clip-style choreography, which has just been chosen to represent France at the Oscars.
The film, which tells the story of a Mexican drug lord who changes his life and becomes a woman, won the Jury Prize at Cannes and a collective acting award for Zoe Saldana, popstar Selena Gomez and Transgender lead actress Karla Sofía Gascón.
When writing, “I didn’t know if we were doing a musical or an opera,” confided Jacques Audiard. “We didn’t want to go into the official codes of musical comedy,” added its choreographer, Damien Jalet.
“Anything but cheesy”
More classically, the Hollywood industry continues to regularly rely on the musical genre, with results that are difficult to predict at the box office: from the success of Mamma Mia!, Moulin Rouge and La La Land to the failure of the remake of West Side Story by Steven Spielberg in 2021.
The genre is costly, both in terms of time and money. “There are a lot of recordings and re-recordings of songs, playbacks. Many titles go in the trash,” testified Jacques Audiard.
Among the successes, the film Wonka, inspired by the world of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, allowed us to discover the vocal talents of Timothée Chalamet and filled the theaters.
The end of the year will be marked by the release of Wicked, an adaptation of a Broadway hit starring Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and Jeff Goldblum.
“However, we remain far from” the golden age of musical comedies, in the 1930s to 1950s, with hundreds of films of the genre. Today, it remains an exception but perfect for portraying “bigger than life” characters, underlines Alexis Lormeau, author of Sing and Dance at the Cinema (Apprimerie editions).
In the end, “few films” are true musicals, with songs integrated into the narration and dance scenes, adds Isabelle Wolgust, author of the Dictionary of the Musical Comedy (ed. Rouge Profond).
Is the public allergic to genre?
Not necessarily, replies the specialist, who emphasizes that the consumption of series like Glee has changed habits.
And if classic musicals are generally inspired by successes on stage, the converse also exists.
French director Mathieu Kassovitz, who is adapting the punchy film La Haine on stage from October 10, believes in it and promises a musical comedy that is anything but “cheesy”: “We’re trying to break all that up a little bit and not necessarily respect the rules and customs of this format,” he explained.
Francois BECKER/AFP
Emilia Perez selected to represent France at the Oscars, Lady Gaga who puts to music Joker 2: the musical is infusing everywhere this fall at the cinema, perhaps a return of hype for a genre that has long been shunned.Joker: Folie à deux is it a musical? “I wouldn’t say that it is one strictly speaking”, decided at the Venice Film Festival…
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