Movie time

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

 It must have been the Bacollywood fever. Over a week since that festival of indie films closed, where I had the pleasure of watching the delightful “Amok” of Lawlaw Fajardo, here I am rummaging through old DVDs and CDs. It’s that time again, I was smiling to myself, as I closed the blinds and put in “Sunset Boulevard”, the classic drama about an aging silent movie queen, and movies in general.

What was it they said about classics?  They never go out of fashion, they do not simply survive time, they in fact “grow”; each screening offers new insights, new  ideas, new realizations.

This  is so with “Sunset Boulevard.”  Directed by Billy Wilder and starred in by William Hiolden, Gloria Swanson, and Erich Von Stroheim, it so richly-textured, the movie just keeps growing over time, it is as if each time watches it is the first.

“Sunset…” of course has given us one of the most iconic characters from the movies, almost like perhaps Mickey Mouse and Snow White, literary characters that have lived from generation to generation. It is the story of Norma Desmond, star of the silent movies who kept hanging to stardom in her mind, even as the movies have moved on to talkies.

Norma lives in a palace, with a butler who  feeds her illusion that she was still a star adored by millions around the world. He keeps the fan mail going by mailing the letters themselves. Into her lonely life enters Joseph Gillis, a hungry screenwriter out of work and up to  his neck in debt.

She takes him in, supposedly to edit the script of her comeback movie [“I hate that word!” she says, “It’s a return…”] She keeps him, the 1940s version of a boy toy – until he chafes under her controls and maneuverings and tries to bolt, with tragic consequences.

It is  a bizarre story, almost unbelievable. But it is  done so beautifully, you suspend disbelief, and go with the flow, to the end. It is in black and white, which works very well for the film’s intentions, given that it is also a dark film, delving into the dark recesses of a mad woman driven into deeper madness by love . or what she thought was love.

This is the movie that gave us famous lines such as “I am big! It’s the pictures that got small!” and “Mr. de Mille, I’m ready for my close up!” Or: “I warn you, don’t give me a fancy price just because I’m rich.”

When it was translated into a broadway play  in the 1990s, it was starred in by Glenn Close, and the play gave us such musical hits as “As if We Never Said Goodbye” and “With One Look”. Of course while Close was the original recording, the more heartfelt version is that of Barbra Streisand, and you’d understand why if you know the original story. Barbra sings the songs like they were written for her.

What really makes “Sunset…” so engaging through the generations is because it tells a story, first and foremostly. No fancy work, just simple good story-telling and it works, as it always does.  And because it tells the story with honesty, “Sunset…” succeeds in laying before us very human emotions that, despite the time and geography, we can all relate to: Norma’s need for affirmation in her twilight years and Joseph’s desperation in his early years as writer are situations we can all relate to from whatever station in life we are.

This in turn starts with a powerful script, one filled with aptly sarcastic, cynical lines as it gives us a peek into the state of moviemaking back in the 1940s.  The result is an engaging piece of entertainment that along the way, teaches us a thing or two about ourselves.*

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