At 11:48 AM 11/3/97 -0800, you wrote:
>On Saturday, I saw the musical "Rent" and would be interested in what other
>people on pen-l think about it. (Luckily my in-laws paid for the tix; this
>ain't people's theatre.) I thought its point was that the "bourgeois" ideas
>about love and its importance applied not only to the usual "straight"
>couples but also to down-and-out bohemians, including AIDS-stricken gays,
>lesbians, and drag queens.
>
>in pen-l solidarity,
>
>Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html
>"Dear, you increase the dopamine in my accumbens." -- words of love for the
>1990s.
>
I haven't seen "Rent", but it should be noted that it is based on Puccini's
"La Boheme" which is itself based on Henri Murger's novel, who lived from
1822 to 1861. The novel and the opera are designed to give the middle-class
a voyeur's delight with the travails and joys of the dispossessed.
"Rent" is clearly in this tradition from what I understand. The audience
that attends each performance on Broadway is about as remote from the lower
east side as was the audience that used to attend "Hair". Like "Hair", I
understand that "Rent" is excellent theatre with 3-dimensional characters
and good music.
My favorite treatment of Murger's novel is the movie done by the saturnine,
anti-capitalist Finnish director Kaurismaki:
--------------------------------------------
'La Vie de Boheme� (NR)
By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer November 05, 1993
Nothing actualy "happens" in an Aki Kaurismaki film. But things emerge --
deadpan, funny things. You have to become accustomed to the movie's low
blood pressure, its subtly satiric rhythms.
The Finnish director has an exact target in mind, the niche between bathos
and true poignance. His characters seem subdued, even hypnotized, but
they're single-mindedly aware of the grim existence around their necks. The
effect is funny, but not whoopingly campy. Their personal pain is too real
and involving to push them into that zone.
In "La Vie de Boheme," Kaurismaki's slow-and-steady mood piece about
artistic squalor in Paris, all of these things come into signature play.
Based on the same 19th-century novel (Henri Murger's "Scenes de la Vie de
Boheme) that inspired Puccini's opera, the story is about three
down-and-out losers doomed to penury and artistic obsession. There's
Albanian painter Rodolfo (Matti Pellonpaa), playwright Marcel (Andre Wilms)
and composer Schaunard (Kari Vaananen). Their problems are exactly the
same: no rent or food money and the futile struggle to be recognized.
It doesn't help Marcel that he refuses to reduce his 21-act play to
commercial size or that the chances of Schaunard's latest work making it
(it's called "The Influence of Blue on Art") seem remote.
The story -- by Kaurismaki's disingenuous admission -- is intentionally
awful and meandering. But it's regularly interrupted by the mutely amusing
-- or the sad. Enter, for instance, rich gentleman Jean-Pierre Leaud
(Francois Truffaut's erstwhile leading man), who commissions a
self-portrait from Rodolfo. While Leaud poses, playwright Marcel,
pretending to hang up the client's tuxedo jacket, uses it for a job
interview. He gets the job and brings the jacket back just in time
(actually, he's about 10 excruciating seconds late).
An affair between Rodolfo and Mimi (Evelyne Didi), a quiet, constantly
perturbed woman, becomes very real, particularly when poverty (and
Rodolfo's eviction by the immigration authorities) forces them apart. She
eventually returns but they have to face her tubercular future together.
"Boheme," which runs until Nov. 17 at the Biograph, will be shown in tandem
(from Nov. 12 to 17) with three other Kaurismaki films: "The Match Factory
Girl," "Leningrad Cowboys Go America" and "Ariel." To see one Kaurismaki is
to see them all, but you should see them all.
Copyright The Washington Post
Louis Proyect
