Not that long ago I looked at another musical, The Sound of Music.
The one I’m looking at this week is from around the same time period, and it’s also staring a couple with a complicated relationship, and it also deals with Nazis, but really, the two movies could not be more different in tone, subject-matter, and what it’s doing with the form of the musical.
This really goes to show how different the movies on this list can be. You can get movies that on the surface seem like they might have a lot in common, but offer completely different experiences and messages.
Of course, I’m talking about Cabaret, written by Joe Masteroff and directed by Bob Fosse.
An escape
Actually, the messages of the two movies might seem a little similar too. The message of The Sound of Music was that we can find beauty in life. A nice optimistic message that can make everyone feel better by watching.
The message of Cabaret, on the other hand, is escape is powerful and something we crave in dark times.
On the surface, this seems like the same message, but Cabaret offers the much more dark version of it.
The Cabaret as a whole is an escape. With Naziism as a constant threat to both the patrons and the performers in the cabaret, it offers a total diversion from it. The emcee, played by the awesome Joel Grey, takes control and offers a fantasy, but a fantasy that isn’t quite real.
Sally and Mas start a relationship that in some ways is a perfect escape but in many ways isn’t real either either, in that Max is gay, and Liza isn’t really everything she pretends to be either.
Even the songs in the movie, which are great and cause us, as the audience to get lost in them, isn’t quite real in the way the songs in most musicals are. They’re all diegetic, taking place inside the actual club. They’re not manifestations of the characters like they are when Dorothy sings Somewhere over the Rainbow or when Gene Kelly sings Singing in the Rain, but they are performances that the characters put on to provide this escape for the consumers, and in reality for the movie audience.
So in this way, the movie is the dark evil twin of The Sound of Music. It’s much more forboding and leaves the viewer with a sense of unease instead of one of euphoria.
This isn’t a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s pretty amazing that great movies can cause such different emotions in the viewer because life is so full of different emotions.
And in this expose of fakeness, the movie becomes real in a way most movies are not. Reflecting real life, we can get lost in Liza’s performance, aware of the unreality of it, but also appreciating how it can sweep us away to that.
And isn’t that a reality of movies in general, anyway. They can transport us to somewhere else, and even in our darkest times, knowing what it’s doing, it still has the power to provide that escape.
Life is a cabaret, but it is also like Cabaret.
Thanks for reading!
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