Cabaret

Cabaret

Set  between the two World Wars and during the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Cabaret tells the story of a young  man who went for a while in Berlin to teach English in a little rent  where the star of a cabaret Sally Bowles stays too. Adapted from the  Broadway musical show Cabaret as a traditionnal romance with musical numbers set between scenes. Some  musicals numbers seem forced to fit in the story, because Bob Fosse did  not used the numbers to tell the story à la Parapluies de Cherbourg but to illustre it with Cabaret numbers only. Liza Minnelli  as Sally Bowles gives an excellent performance and she overshadows the  good performance of Michael York.

I generally like musicals but  this one didn't charmed me. The numbers are confined to the cabaret and  they have a lack of inventivity in the way they were chot and presented  to the screen. I was waiting for much more than that. Some musical  moments aren't necessary for the story and it's ok that they are not  that long either.

The directing is traditionnal and unpersonnal for a film of the 1970's it felt very conservative...

Cabaret is uneven and, in my opinion,  a deception. For fans of Liza Minnelli especially.

A Film Retrospective by Michaël Parent

http://cinephiliaque.blogspot.com/2010/03/cabaret-un-film-de-bob-fosse.html

Recommendations: Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Duel

Last updated: 2010-10-19 10:57:07 by MichaelParent

Cabaret

I was surprised at myself to find that I actually liked Cabaret after I had watched it. I had seen the play that my college had put on about a month ago, and I was dreading having to watch it again, not because I didn't like it the first time but because I had to watch both of them in quick succession. Still, I found that the movie added a lot more to the play that I either missed while watching it or was added to the film because the movie wasn't live. Either way, Cabaret was a pleasant surprise.

Cabaret is about - well - just that: a cabaret. Yet the movie encompasses more than just a cabaret, focusing on relationships with the quirky Sally Bowles (played by Liza Minnelli) and the British sophisticate Brian (Michael York) while in Germany. As we progress through both the different acts of the cabaret, where Sally works, and both Brian and Sally's relationship, we also see the torn nature of the society of Berlin, where, in 1931, is the beginning of the Nazi movement and World War II.

Why Cabaret was so interesting was not because it was a musical, but the way that it used the music to tell the story. I don't particularly enjoy musicals, but I could appreciate how the cabaret's music was spliced with scenes in Brian and Sally's life that were either ironic or very similar to what they were going through. The creativity of the choreography was also great, as, even though the cabaret is a sleazy bar of sorts, we can still put value to the singing and dancing that looks like it has taken a lot of work and practice to master.

While Cabaret is considered a musical comedy, and it at times can be fun, the main draw is its sinister undertones, which sometimes come out wide in the open but at others the audience can just see hints of it. Joel Grey as the Master of Ceremonies is already frightful at the start of the movie, but as we see the musical acts of the cabaret progress, we begin to see his face and actions take on a more sinister meaning. During a mud-wrestling scene in the cabaret, we get our first glimpse that all is not what it seems in this happy-go-lucky stage show, as Grey picks up a little mud and smears it above his mouth like a Hitler-stache.

But it's possible for this movie to be both fun and dramatic. Liza Minnelli's Sally is both a likable and eccentric character, where at times we may feel embarrassed for her but can't help but laugh at her overly immature and inappropriate actions. We have a character named Fritz who's a helpless Jew-turned-German in love with a Jewish woman, and his actions, partly because he doesn't speak English well, help to turn our attention to the comedy that is going along right beside the Nazi regime's violence. Helmut Griem plays a two-timing rich man named Maximilian, who we can just tell is going to be the start of some troubles between Sally and Brian because of his ridiculous bleach-blond milk mustache. If any guy has a mustache like this


you should probably stay away from him (no disrespect towards Mr. Griem.) With the ensemble of characters, we are pretty much always entertained in the way that we're supposed to feel.

The movie is disturbing when it edits the music from the cabaret together with Nazi violence, especially during a scene where the cabaret is performing a number called "Slaphappy" while Nazis beat a man to death outside who had escorted a Nazi out of the cabaret some nights before. Scenes where we see that the Nazis are beginning to take power over the Germans are minimally thrown in throughout, and the ending scene is just chilling.

Overall, the movie does everything that it wanted to do right. We get many conflicts happening at once, and where we are supposed to forget our troubles, we are faced with the irony that we might be able to forget them, like Sally, but we can never get away from them. We must face them in order to conquer them, and the Nazi regime is not an easy one to face, as Brian will tell you. In Cabaret, the music isn't everything - there's more going on than meets the eye, which parallels the takeover of Nazi Germany in the '30s quite nicely. You can dance and sing, but your troubles will still be there.

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