At the press screening, Richard Linklater's ‘Blue Moon’ was met with great applause. The film is a tribute to the author and songwriter Lorenz ‘Larry’ Hart, who, together with composer Richard Rogers, wrote the lyrics for numerous musical hits on Broadway in the 1920s and 1930s. There is no doubt that the two of them wrote wonderful songs, not least the hit ‘Blue Moon’.
‘An intimate character study, Blue Moon is warmly shot, soaked in nostalgia for a lost theatrical world’, writes Screen International enthusiastically.
But in Linklater's homage, nothing is authentic. The set literally smells of a studio and theatre stage. We are supposedly in the fashionable New York theatre bar ‘Sardi's’. It is 1943, opening night of the new production ‘Oklahoma!’ with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. Lorenz Hart, played by Ethan Hawke in a ridiculous wig, finds the new musical dreadful, which is instantly obvious given its prairie patriotism. Hart, a heavy alcoholic, is on the decline. Soon Oscar Hammerstein will take his place as musical lyricist alongside Richard Rodgers.
But in the meantime, Hart indulges in endless monologues that could just as easily be staged as a radio play. He constantly wavers between delusions of grandeur and self-pity, delivering all kinds of tried and sometimes funny lines. Suggestive jokes about half erections and erotic adventures are his speciality. Larry Hart is actually gay, which Ethan Hawke tries to illustrate with forced overacting. He has also been visually reduced in size to resemble the diminutive Larry Hart, which means that Hawke has to shuffle around the bar with bent knees.
He shares insider quotes and dialogue from ‘Casablanca’ with the bartender (Bobby Cannavale) and constantly tells him that he has a rendezvous with Elizabeth, a 20-year-old student from Yale. He may be gay, but he loves beauty in all its forms. When his queen of hearts, played by Margaret Qualley, finally turns up, she is primarily interested in the team of the successful composer Rodgers (Andrew Scott).
Coincidentally, E.B. White, the legendary columnist for the New Yorker, is also sitting in the bar and Larry Hart inspires him to write his famous children's book ‘Stuart Little’. As background music, a GI plays the most famous Broadway melodies by Rodgers and Hart on the piano. The opening night photographer can be no one other than Arthur ‘Wegee’ Fellig. But how fleeting this beautiful world is, George Gershwin has been dead for five years and in a few months Larry Hart will also die of alcoholism and pneumonia at the age of 48.
The warm light of nostalgia that floods the bar underlines the artificial impression of the whole film. A piece from the costume archive without any self-irony.
The French film ‘La cache’ (The Hiding Place) also takes us back in time. We are in 1968, in May ‘68 to be precise. All hell is breaking loose on the streets of Paris, while an unnamed family leads a strange life in a spacious flat in Rue Grenelle. The film is told from the perspective of the 9-year-old grandson, with director Lionel Baier commenting on the events from off-screen. Self-deprecatingly, he reflects on the difficulty of realising a book that is actually impossible to film. ‘La cache’ is based on the novel of the same name by Christophe Boltanski, which the Swiss director freely adapted together with Catherine Charrier. The dramaturgical fragmentation and ironic distance make the film a narrative pleasure.
First, there is the energetic grandmother (Dominique Reymond), who comes from a conservative monarchist family but sides with the workers and reads the communist ‘L'Humanité’. Her husband is a renowned Jewish doctor (Michel Blanc) whose parents come from Odessa. The ageless great-grandmother smokes cigarettes with tips and listens to records of classical Russian music. The ‘older uncle’ is a linguist, the ‘younger uncle’ an installation artist. The boy's parents have no time for him as they are fighting for a better future on the barricades of the Latin Quarter. The family is a multi-layered organism in which everyone is closely connected, explains the voiceover, quoting the novel.
One day, a high ranking guest turns up looking for a hiding place. A hiding place where the grandfather already fled from the German occupiers in 1943. This hiding place was the topographical centre of the flat during the war. ‘Everyone slept around the hiding place that year’, as the author Christophe Boltanski explained at the press conference. The miraculous rescue of the grandfather from deportation and the extermination camp forms the background to the ironic story of 1968. It was clear to director Lionel Baier what he wanted to avoid: ‘Under no circumstances did I want to make a film about the Shoah’.
All of this is told in passing, sometimes only hinted at and ironically fragmented. A quality that ‘Blue Moon’ completely lacks. If you are familiar with the book, you can identify the characters and know that the author is telling the story of his own eccentric family in the Rue de Grenelle. The ‘older uncle’ is the famous linguist Jean-Élie Boltanski, who refused to accept a university chair throughout his life. The younger one, Christian Boltanski, has become a world-famous artist and the militant father is Luc Boltanski, one of the most important French sociologists.
‘La cache’ is dedicated to the great French actor Michel Blanc, who passed away after the end of filming. Dominique Reymond as his wife masterfully embodies the emotional centre of the family universe, which she holds together with charm and an iron hand, as evidenced not least by her breakneck driving style. With humour and lightness, ‘La cache’ marks a cinematic highlight of the competition.