- Meet Me in St. Louis
The Music Box is currently running a weekend matinee series titled “Weepie Noir: The Dark Side of Women’s Pictures,” dedicated to those studio melodramas influenced by the expressiveness of film-noir style. The first film on the program is Vincente Minnelli’s adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, an ideal selection. Minnelli, of course, is among the most expressive American filmmakers ever, a master of aesthetic design and transcendent style. Andrew Sarris famously wrote that the director cared more about beauty than art; while he meant this somewhat pejoratively, there’s plenty of truth in such a statement. Minnelli’s cinema uses aesthetic fetishizing as a formal principle, and features characters who relish beauty and enchantment, or at least what they perceive to be enchantment. At the heart of the director’s occasionally garish and unabashedly expressive work is a deep sense of longing, of characters searching for an ideal existence and encountering societal, political, ideological, philosophical restraints. It’s the sublime emotion that exists just below his bawdy surfaces that give his films their radiance. You can see my five favorite Minnelli films below.
- Lust for Life (1956) Similar to Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr. Turner, a biopic about painter J.M.W. Turner, this look at the life of Vincent van Gogh adopts some of the painter’s own techniques to consider the nature of style and the methods of aestheticism. In a compositional sense, the film has a realistic feel, but Minnelli’s graphic mise-en-scene and poetic transitions give the impression of moving paintings, and when the film is at its most dazzling, there’s a sense that the director is reshaping the very nature of existence.
