“Joker: Folie à Deux” Hollywood’s problem with musicals
It was clear and hoped that the press conference for Joker: Folie à Deux would be a heated one since the eve of the press conference in the Venice press room. With the landing at the Lido of two stars like Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix hunting for Oscars, with a film in the running for the Golden Lion that likes to imagine itself as controversial and cutting, all the ingredients were already there for a sparkling cast/journalists interaction. Those in the know were waiting for Phoenix, forced to dodge questions about the gay drama project directed by Todd Haynes who has abandoned 5 days into filming. The inevitable dodge came, the question was equally inevitable: it doesn’t happen often that a Hollywood star blocks the production of a film he strongly wanted, putting his future career in doubt.
Who will insure a film whose lead actor has just made a “Runaway Bride” move after setting up a production worth tens of millions of euros?
Lady Gaga falls for musical
As a surprise It was Lady Gaga who sparked the “how please?” moment at the Joker: Folie à Deux press conference. For the more curious: let it be known that the sequel to the 2019 Golden Lion Joker is by far the worst title seen so far in competition. 138 minutes in length, 318 minutes perceived, despite the entire musical background to the psychiatric and criminal drama of the protagonists. And the Oscar winner Lady Gaga fell for the musical.
For some years now we have been watching with dismay the attempts of the studios, truly ridiculous in their naivety, to passing off films that are musicals as something else, with trailers artfully constructed to hide the presence of songs and dance numbers. It happened with “Wonka,” it will probably happen again this fall with “Wicked.” It’s happening with “Joker: Folie à Deux.”
The new thing is that this time even the protagonist – the Oscar-winning pop star Lady Gaga – was artfully briefed by some PR about how to answer a specific question. A question that could not be missed, given the state of things and given the confusion regarding Joker: Folie à Deux. House of Gucci taught us that Lady Gaga’s presence in the cast does not automatically mean that she will sing, instead A Star is Born confirmed that the singer’s guise is the best key to enjoy his presence on the big screen. Since the arrival of the first promotional materials relating to the sequel to Joker, it has been a tug-of-war of contradictory statements: it’s a musical, no, it’s
Also a musical, yes there is singing and dancing, yes, Lady Gaga will sing but no, it’s not a musical.
When asked directly at the press conference, the artist reiterated his official line. Joker: Folie à Deux is not a musical because (and I quote literally) “music is used to really give the characters a way to express what they need to say because the scene and dialogue is just not enough” (music is used to really give the characters a way to express what they need to say because the scene and dialogue are just not enough). One might say that this is a perfect description of why, in musical films, the characters move from dialogue to singing: when the limits of the word are as tangible as those of reality, music, dance, and fantasy come to the rescue.
Lady Gaga is wrong: Joker: Folie à Deux is a musical
Lady Gaga is wrong this time. I don’t know if she was simply badly advised by those who know that the label will have a negative impact on the film’s potential takings or if she was just acting in bad faith. Having seen the film in question, I can provide a couple of elements to prove the fact that it’s a musical, even if we can grant it to be sui generis.
We start from the mere amount: Joker: Folie à Deux features a good ten songs, divided equally between the two protagonists of the film. Aside: it takes a lot of courage to entrust so many musical numbers to a singer less than discreet like Joaquin Phoenix, but it’s one of the minor problems of a film that derails inexorably after the first ten minutes.
The pieces sung by the two of them, too they hark back to old musicals from the 50s and 60s, complete with a clip set to music from a Hollywood comedy that brightens up the evening in the psychiatric ward of Arkham Asylum. The film also contains an unreleased song signed and performed by Lady Gaga. With “Folie à Deux” Lady Gaga will probably go hunting for another nomination for best song. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the song is light years smaller than “Shallow”, so much so that it struggles to stand out from the rest of the background music and the film’s repertoire.
Also the how and when the songs are inserted into the narrative screams “musical” and it harks back to the specific Hollywood tradition that later inspired films like La La Land (one of the last musicals to proudly claim its nature). In fact, a good part of the musical numbers are dreams, daydreams, hallucinations of the protagonist who has fallen in love with the beautiful arsonist interned in a different wing of the security prison where he is awaiting trial. Joker is in love and sings, not only in his imagination – in which he dreams in the moonlight of having her in his arms and ends up carrying her to the altar –
but also in reality. The prison riot erupts to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” Lee’s courtship is set to “Dancing in the Moonlight.”
Making Lady Gaga’s denialist position even weaker is the fact that on a couple of occasions the singing is combined with dancing, with highly choreographed sequencesThere is an escape attempt in which the two evade the prison guards by dancing and playing music, while in a later scene Arthur/Joker tap dances.
The good news for Lady Gaga is that, genre definitions aside, her presence in the film is one of the few redeemable elements in a boring, cumbersome, inconclusive and truly uninspired film. The bad news is that Hollywood continues to produce musicals or pseudo-musicals, but continues to be terrified of the “m-word.”
