{"id":84096,"date":"2015-03-26T15:08:12","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T19:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84096"},"modified":"2016-02-29T14:23:49","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T19:23:49","slug":"drunk-in-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/26\/drunk-in-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Drunk in Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sixty-four years later, <\/em>The Tales of Hoffmann continues to delight and perplex.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"a<\/a>

A still from The Tales of Hoffmann<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Lovers of the recherch\u00e9\u00a0have flocked to see Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger\u2019s\u00a01951 Tales of Hoffmann<\/em> at Film Forum<\/a>, where it\u2019s still showing for one more day. In a newly restored print, the film\u2019s fantastical\u00a0mise-en-sc\u00e8ne and\u00a0extravagant polychrome glory assault\u00a0viewers head on for a\u00a0hundred and thirty-three minutes. At each screening, Martin Scorsese introduces Hoffmann<\/em> in a videotaped homily, during which\u00a0he confesses to an \u201cobsession\u201d with the film, having first fallen for it, strangely enough, when it aired in black-and-white on Million Dollar Movie<\/em>. Most critics rave or rant, or both, about this odd work. The amiable\u00a0William Germano,\u00a0the author of a smart, slim volume<\/a> about the film for\u00a0the British Film Institute,\u00a0spoke at the screening I attended, and his was\u00a0one of the more measured, sanguine appreciations: \u201cWhatever Hoffmann<\/em> was, there had never been a cinematic creation quite like this one.\u201d <\/p>\n

Why all the fuss? What is Tales of Hoffmann<\/em>? Simply put,\u00a0it\u2019s a film\u00a0version of Jacques Offenbach\u2019s opera with dance added. But it\u2019s also a swerving, hyperornamental, terminally self-aware, grandly ambitious, experimental bag of tricks, at once dazzling and daze-inducing. The opera, which Offenbach didn\u2019t live to complete, is a collection of tales about a Romantic poet\u2019s frustrated love; the film also recounts Hoffmann\u2019s adventures in romantic disappointment, but they\u2019re framed within two larger narrative conceits, and it\u2019s here that things begin to go off the rails. The outermost frame is self-conscious in a classic filmic way\u2014Hoffmann<\/em> announces itself using title cards: I am a film of an opera set in Nuremberg. It ends with curtain calls by all the main performers and, after that, with a shot of a stamped\u00a0leather binding that says \u201cMade in England.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"hoffmann-2\"<\/a>Within this, the story begins when Hoffmann, played by the English singer Richard Rounsavell, attends a theatrical performance of his beloved\u2014the dancer Stella, portrayed by Moira Shearer. During intermission, he repairs to a local\u00a0bierstube\u00a0where he proceeds to relate\u2014in song, as one does, to a gathering of German student and artist-types\u2014three\u00a0personal tales of romantic woe.<\/p>\n

But wait: before we enter those sequences, we must look to the mantelpiece in the pub, where all the ceramic characters on a collection of German beer mugs suddenly spring to life and execute a mimed dance. The brief folktale enacted is that pop-medieval standard: a lovelorn jester and a haughty fair maid. Imagine, if you will, that the main characters from Gilbert and Sullivan\u2019s Yeomen of the Guard<\/em> hopped out of ancestral portraits onto the stage, as happens in Ruddigore<\/em>, and performed a burlesque entr\u2019acte with costumes and sets from a Ziegfeid Follies number, but choreographed in a Mark Morris-like mode where the steps map directly onto the lyrics of a song. Yes, it\u2019s that trippy.<\/p>\n

Now, and for the best part of two hours, we head into\u00a0Hoffmann\u2019s three tales, referred to by the names of their heroines\u2014Olympia,\u00a0Giulietta, and Antonia. Archetypally speaking, you can read them as the three faces of woman: the idealized simulacrum, the avaricious whore, and the dying artist. Olympia is an automaton whose ownership is disputed by a mad scientist and a shyster. She dances up a storm, except she keeps winding down. Olympia entrances Hoffmann, who believes she\u2019s human, and becomes the toast of Gay Paree<\/em> until, during a squabble, she\u2019s torn limb from wiry limb. Giulietta, pimped out to steal Hoffman\u2019s shadow in return for fancy jewels, snakes around the stage in a black leotard when she\u2019s not gliding in her gondola to Offenbach\u2019s famous barcarolle (this episode is set in Venice and contains a colorful bacchanal). Antonia is a consumptive singer who must choose between her art and her life. Needless to say, she sings herself to death amid the scenic ruins of a Greek temple on her personal Aegean isle. All three women are controlled by devious men who foil Hoffmann\u2019s bids for love. Once these are completed, a curtain comes down and the decoration on the curtain morphs back into the pub. Hoffmann by now has every sail to the wind. Enter Stella, his current love object, after her performance. She sees Hoffmann shitfaced, turns around, and leaves. Disappointed once again! Then we\u2019re back in the first performance frame, as conductor Sir Thomas Beecham\u2014along with all the opera singers, most of them having performed off camera, and the dancers and actors who embodied their roles on screen, take bows.<\/p>\n

Are you following me? That\u2019s what I thought. Would it help to think of a\u00a0turducken? The turkey is the filmed opera performance of Tales of Hoffmann<\/em>; the duck is Stella\u2019s dance performance and Hoffmann\u2019s binge in the\u00a0beer hall; and the chicken is the three stories of unhappy love he relates. Tuck a bit of stuffing here, a garnish there, and we\u2019re cooking.<\/p>\n

\"HOFF_MAIN2050\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The film\u2019s fame, such as it is, depends not on this pretentious superstructure, but on\u00a0its outstanding\u00a0dance sequences, choreography, and performances, and its freakish, sensational art direction. Frederick Ashton, the choreographer, created dances for Shearer, himself, and two of his\u00a0frenemies: Robert\u00a0Helpmann, with whom he\u2019d had a competitive relationship for many years within the Sadlers\u00a0Wells Ballet, and L\u00e9onide Massine, the distinguished Ballets Russes alum who had been Ashton\u2019s first\u00a0real dance teacher.\u00a0Ashton called Shearer\u2019s dancing \u201cbrittle\u201d; her adamantine, technically flawless executions in the \u201cEnchanted Dragonfly Ballet\u201d and as Olympia, the mechanical doll, are bloodless perfection. Helpmann, meanwhile,\u00a0does more with two eyebrows and a cape than one could ever imagine\u2014that\u2019s about all he does, but he wears four different sets of fake eyebrows and several capes from velvet to gauze. Massine, for his part, burns up the boards as he impersonates a society con man, a pimp, and a deaf servant. Ashton himself, as the motley fool in the beer-stein number, and in\u00a0a second role\u00a0as a sad puppeteer-cum-puppet in \u201cOlympia,\u201d portrays the only characters in the film capable of stealing viewers\u2019 hearts. Along with the virtuosic solo he made on Shearer for the \u201cDoll\u2019s Song\u201d in this act, the dances Ashton created in this section\u2014for dancers impersonating puppets impersonating society gents and ladies, all\u00a0in beguilingly\u00a0parodic\u00a0costumes and make-up\u2014turn \u201cOlympia\u201d into the film\u2019s one surefire masterwork. This despite aficionados who coo over Shearer\u2019s Dragonfly, surely to some degree because that sequence comes out of nowhere\u2014it\u2019s the most entirely\u00a0irrelevant\u00a0and outlandish interpolation in a film brimming over with candidates for that crown.<\/p>\n

\"tales-of-hoffman-flying-boat\"<\/a>As for Hein\u00a0Heckroth\u2019s\u00a0art direction, it must be seen to be believed, and it\u2019s unquestionably the best reason to go. Its stylistic artifice exists somewhere on a spectrum between Hans\u00a0Murnau, Busby Berkeley, and Ken Russell\u2019s far more successfully realized over-the-top rock opera of two decades later, Tommy<\/em>, with perhaps a soup\u00e7on of Children of Paradise<\/em> thrown in. (Russell is clearly the inheritor of the wacky gene mutation in British cinema Tales of Hoffman<\/em> represents.) Its supersaturated palette of bold, synthetic colors could be viewed by the more jaded as a grand totem of the fifties; or, more sympathetically, as some kind of redress for the mandated austerities of postwar Britain.<\/p>\n

For all its kitschy magnificence, painful convolutions,\u00a0and foolish contrivances; its sophistications, both\u00a0real and affected; and its every aspect implausibly, risibly, grotesquely overdone, it\u2019s hard not to view Hoffmann<\/em> as an overcooked dish\u2014high-art dreck. But it\u2019s not that, exactly. The film\u00a0may be crazy and eccentric, but it\u2019s also sincere, and it took genuine, dedicated talent and imagination \u2014lots of both\u2014to pull it together. Whether and what\u2019s been pulled\u00a0off<\/em> are other questions, and despite all the talk, they seem to remain unanswered. Whatever Tales of Hoffmann <\/em>is, one has the impression that everyone\u00a0who has come out to wave a flag at this parade, including Scorsese, knows in his or her heart of hearts that its claim to posterity rests mainly in its extreme\u00a0bizarrerie.<\/p>\n