Golden Eighties (1986)'s comments

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2 years 12 months ago

Chantal Akerman made a musical...?! Golden Eighties is, above all, very odd. It's odd within Akerman's filmography, and it's odd as a piece of film. Joyously odd. Set in the tatty shopping mall in the mid-80s, the musical follows the loves and lives of the people working in three businesses (a juice kiosk, a beauty salon, and a clothing store), the musical numbers a mish-mash of 50s and 80s sensibilities. It predates Hairspray and Cry-Baby, but that's kind of the feeling. (It's perhaps more in the shadow of Cherbourg if anything.) What's most odd for a director known a camera that stares into the mundane is how theatrical it all is. There's a chorus of mall rats, lovers kept apart by rapids of shoppers, fourth wall breaks, and choreographed movement even when we're not in song. Though an ensemble piece, Delphine Seyrig, who was Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, plays a different Jeanne who is just as resilient, if happier with her life and choices. I don't think I've cracked this one's code yet. The musical veneer is so shockingly weird, the themes - whether feminism, or the Holocaust, or whatever else in the human condition is suggested - are hard to grasp on a first viewing. Not that they need to be because this is probably the most fun you'll have with an Akerman film.

3 years 9 months ago