Everyone Says I Love You

(Woody Allen, USA, 1996)

Can anybody be a true cinephile and not love musicals? Personally, I doubt it. People come to this particular love from many angles: a Broadway showbiz angle, a camp angle, a romantic comedy angle, a cine-stylistics angle, an opera/operetta angle.

However you get there, the musical genre, in all is wildly diverse forms and manifestations, registers as one of the great summits of cinematic art. Those who begin their demurrals with the tired old “when characters open their mouth to sing, I become disengaged” can just … go and disengage themselves from reading this, right now!

Jean-Luc Godard once put it in a nutshell when he suggested, in the 1950s, that “the musical is the idealisation of cinema”. We know intuitively what he meant by that: that a musical seems like the purest, most perfect form of cinema – in that it is a seamless fantasy, a perfect transport. As well as the perfect fusion of image, sound, movement and gesture.

In the unreal movie world conjured by musicals, everyone is (sometimes!) glamorous, free and emotionally expressive; song and dance bring about the kinds of intimate, overflowing contacts we long for in daily life. You can call that kind of film-fantasy a lie, if you are so stingily disposed. Or you could call it a marvellous supplement to life, an imitation of life, “the world and its metaphor” (Godard again) – reaching, touching, stirring and inspiring us in all sorts of complex, miraculous ways.

But I don’t believe it’s enough simply to say that musicals are just fantasies or dreams. Musicals, as a realm of the Ideal, exist and work in an intimate, symbiotic relationship with the Real, with every trace and model of the everyday, material world that we carry around in our heads. All art does this; but no art does it more acutely or more poignantly than the musical.

One of the all-time greatest works of film-critical literature is Richard Dyer’s essay “Entertainment and Utopia”. This much-reprinted piece, which I first read in a special 1977 musicals issue of Movie (UK), had an enormous influence on the way I receive and experience movies. Dyer works out the idea that idealised musicals present us with models or pictures of perfect worlds, Utopias: “Alternatives, wishes, hopes – these are the stuff of Utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realised”. But, as he makes clear, musicals trade not so much in intellectual concepts or theories of utopia, but a lived Utopia – a sense of what a Utopia would feel like, emotionally.

For me much popular art fits (in various ways and at different levels) this concept of the lived, felt Utopia. But, while embracing this intense, oceanic fantasy aspect of musicals, Dyer is keen to counter-act the simplistic idea that they are therefore simply escapist – that they allow us just to switch off, zone out or daydream in a patently irrelevant, mindless fashion.

If idealistic, Utopian entertainment is to truly work, if it’s going to touch us, it needs to somehow take off from the real experiences of its audiences. This acknowledgement of reality in a musical is sometimes very explicit, at other times implicit, silent, apparently absent – but it is always there, at work on some deep, animating level. Musicals are not just escapist fantasy; in a sense, they move between the realms of the Ideal and the Real, exploring that in-between territory. Their beauty, poetry and expressivity come precisely from that tension.

Dyer compares the Utopian feeling-solutions evident in musicals with the real-world conditions they seem to answer. Scarcity in the real world is answered by overflowing material abundance on screen; the exhaustion of the daily grind is replaced by unremitting energy, such as the energy of dance; dreariness is replaced by intensity; isolation is replaced by community; and emotional manipulation and fakery is transcended in absolute gestures of transparency, “open, spontaneous, honest communications and relationships”. Or, to put it another way, using the words of Raymond Durgnat, musicals are contemporary myths, but they “reveal at least the outlines of those parts of reality against which the myth is braced”.

I’m going to skip the entire glorious history of the great days of Hollywood musicals, in order to go straight to a particular crucial moment in the global history of the genre – the moment that is, as well, most pertinent to Woody Allen’s intriguing Everyone Says I Love You, our present case study.

It’s 1961. The Hollywood studio system is crumbling apart. When the ‘50s ended, it seemed that most of the great genres – Western, melodrama, fantasy films for kids – were also in a process of finishing up. A certain kind of idealised movie-fantasy evaporated in the hard, clear air of burgeoning ‘60s counter-culture. A new realism was being called for, in everything from early John Cassavetes to Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), not to mention the films of an entire cadre of tele-drama-honed directors including Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn and John Frankenheimer.

At that moment, all the magic formulae of escapist entertainment seemed to be suddenly lost, unworkable, unrevivable. The musical with a spectacular but intimate air, and a very sophisticated, elaborate cinematic style – the musicals of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, of Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen – seemed well and truly dead. In its place, the ‘60s wheeled out bloated, theatrical extravaganzas, with little art and less magic – a tendency that continues to today with the likes of the laughably dreadful Evita (Alan Parker, 1996).

Meanwhile, in the France of ‘61, the guy who defined the musical as the idealisation of cinema makes one – a musical of sorts, not a perfect, seamless musical, but a deliberately broken, tatty one. It’s also a tatty romantic comedy: Godard’s A Woman is a Woman. It’s probably the first of a new kind of musical, the sign of a weird, historic mutation. Remember, this is the same Godard who also said of his Nouvelle Vague generation of filmmakers: “When we were at last able to make films, we could no longer make the kind of films which had made us want to make films”.

For Godard, A Woman is a Woman was “not a musical” but “the idea of a musical” – deliberately falling short of any Platonic Ideal. So, scraps of song and dance – rather pitiful scraps, performed by actors (Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy) who were far from perfect singers and dancers – alternate harshly and violently with realistic street scenes, swearing and banality, and scenes from a forcedly sweet but rather alienated modern relationship.

This Godard movie has a strange but potent poignancy. It gestures nostalgically toward the musical from the vantage point of our modern, real world: a lost Utopia, a faint echo or fond dream. A beautiful but sad memory, since it is not where we currently are in time or place, and maybe not where we will ever be again. So much for the anticipatory, Utopian promise which the Hollywood musicals held out to us … Once Upon a Time!

The over-40-year history of what I call the mutant musical – which weighs down the idealised dreams of the genre with heavy markers of reality – is itself a rich and extraordinary tradition. It takes in the great career of Jacques Demy: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) among other, less well-known musicals about a worker’s factory strike, an Orpheus story set in a modern underground carpark, or a bittersweet tale of father-daughter incest. Or Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1982), where the musical reference is literally off-screen, taking place solely on the soundtrack in song-duets between Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle, while the poor actors on screen struggle even to warble a bare chorus of “You Are My Sunshine”. Or Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven (TV 1978, film 1981); or Chantal Akerman’s Golden Eighties (1986), set in a shopping mall. And right on through Jacques Rivette’s sublime Up Down Fragile (1995) …

If I entertain a particularly intense, sentimental attachment to this touching, sometimes perverse tradition of the musical mutation, it may be because I once sang in one myself. It was a very sophisticated (both technically and conceptually) Australian Super-8 film, Jayne Stevenson’s Dreams Come True (1982), and I describe it here (however immodestly!) because it sums up so perfectly the terrain of the new-style, modernist musical. (Actually getting to see it, these days, is another matter altogether. During the ‘90s, it was briefly issued on a dazzling but limited-edition Super-8 compilation … on VHS.)

In this short film, four film fans are gathered to reminisce about a viewing experience that is particularly dear to them. In turn, each tells the story of how they came to see a particular musical, then they relate the plot of that film leading up to a certain song … and then they sing the song, suddenly glamorously made up, gorgeously lit and dreamily photographed. I chose to sing “Falling in Love Again” from the Sternberg-Dietrich classic The Blue Angel (1930 – some would dispute the musical tag, but not me: there are songs performed in it, that’s enough!). I had first viewed in in a purple-curtained, below-ground art cinema at the age of 14: a formative and prophetic experience …

Falling in love again is, as ever, Woody Allen’s subject in Everyone Says I Love You. This is a found-object musical, a kind of musical collage, a “jukebox musical” as it gets called nowadays – in that its songs are all old, familiar songs, standards like “My Baby Just Cares For Me”, “I’m Thru With Love” and "Makin’ Whoopee". In this regard, it is a little in the vein of Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975 [restored director’s cut 2013]).

Allen’s effort is clearly a mutant musical in at least two respects. First, the songs interact with a story that is basically naturalistic, or at least as naturalistic as Allen’s romantic comedies get. There are his familiar characters; the same ritzy, up-town apartments; the same warm, neurotic, brittle banter between friends, ex-lovers, new lovers. Except that, this time, people sing and dance, and the voice-over narration stresses repeatedly that this kind of story, with its special coincidences, miracles and absurdities, should really only be told this way – as a musical.

But this is a second-degree musical, between quotation marks, a musical that knows it is a musical. Such self-knowledge brings with it special problems and obligations. As every film teacher in the world knows, the hardest thing about getting students to watch musicals these days is that they burst into derisive (maybe defensive) laughter every time a character stops talking and starts singing – as if this were just the most unforgivably unreal thing in the world, and as if movies were not completely constituted from artifice of all kinds from top to bottom.

Be that as it may, Allen has a playful, slightly ironic way of marking the start of each song in his film: he gets that familiar derisive laugh from the crowd, but then he drags you into the wistful or sweet emotion that follows. This is how he tries to overcome the crippling, defensive, anti-musicals reaction.

Above all else, there’s a hesitancy, a tentativeness, an outright clutziness about most of the musical performances in this film. You hear real, normal voices, not always bold or even in tune; and you watch the goofy little foot-shuffles and awkward swaying of stars like Alan Alda, Drew Barrymore, Julia Roberts, Tim Roth and Woody himself. And the effect of all this physical, audible reality, at least on me, was just lovely.

I have heard it said that these modern, shamelessly clumsy musicals give us the feeling that everyone, any of us, could somehow star in a musical, somehow exist in this ever-so-slightly idealised universe (I have also heard this idea brutally mocked!). It’s not the grand, libertarian, Utopian dream of the golden days of Hollywood musicals, to be sure – but it is some kind of fond fantasy, and one that I share. Everyone can be in a musical: even given our all-too-human frailty, our imperfections, our lack of super-human charisma, whether or not we are trained singers or dancers … we can still step into some small circle of enchantment, just for a precious moment or two.

That’s the relationship between Ideal and Real which these modern musicals explore and dramatise. It’s a new form of cinema, geared to bittersweet, melancholic wisdom about the way we live today. The critic-novelist-filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinksy wrote commented on this sensibility in a late 1960s article on A Woman is a Woman.

It is [the] simultaneous celebration of beauty and its frailty, of gaiety and its ephemerality, of the transient nature of all emotion, that reveals in A Woman is a Woman a peculiar romantic attitude, reserved and self-denying, which is perhaps the only possible romanticism for a contemporary sensibility.

A reserved and self-denying romantic attitude: those words do even better duty for Allen than for Godard. I like Allen’s movies more when they dive into the pain and the absurd hilarity of the way partners break up from each other in sudden, inexplicable ways – the instant ways people collide, connect, and just as instantly disconnect. Husbands and Wives (1992) explored that in a fairly dark key; but with Everyone Says I Love You, Allen is back to his fond, bemused vision of the human comedy.

There can be a somewhat nasty, cloistered, pinched, mean-spirited side to Allen’s view of the way the world turns, and I well know that this turns some viewers off his films entirely. Many of his central characters run on great reserves of narcissism, superiority and alienated gratification: this is the pop-cultural territory of TV sitcoms like Friends [1994-2004], a territory that Allen helped create. He tends to depict a comfortable, middle-class community that depends, for its chummy cohesiveness and solidarity, on vicious exclusions of anyone even remotely, comically different – like anyone poor, ethnic, criminal …

Everyone Says I Love You has some stunningly bald jokes along these lines. But if we’re going to decry every film that sits uncritically within a comfortable bourgeois milieu, we are going to lose an awful lot of cinema purely for the sake of what philosopher Stanley Cavell calls the “profitless interpretation” of a slice of popular art.

The truth is, there’s the banality of the social status quo and a kind of sickly sweet, sentimental, regretful nostalgia all over Everyone Says I Love You. But there are miracles, too – positively Utopian moments, particularly in a marvellous Parisian finale involving Allen and Goldie Hawn. And there is all the truthful, wise emotion that Allen, as writer-director, explores in those real/ideal gaps – whether real and ideal musical, or real and ideal love. What Cozarinsky said about A Woman is a Woman back in the ‘60s holds perfectly for Everyone Says I Love You today.

The film has a beauty that is brash and pathetic, like splintered coloured glass, fragments that somehow compose a picture while refusing to hold together: musical, sad, uproarious, definitely frail.

Postscript (A) 2023: Few films plummeted as much in my estimation on a second viewing, 20 years later, as Everyone Says I Love You. Its mise en scène often looked clumsy and threadbare to me, and its parade of characters and sentimental dilemmas no longer added up to much. In short, the film left me very cold. Then again, my general estimation of Allen’s work, in its various phases, has steeply fallen and just as steeply risen over the considerable span of his career. See here for an appreciation, here for the 1990s downturn; and here for a ‘late style’ reprieve. Maybe it’s time for another look at Everyone Says I Love You!

Postscript (B) 2023: My extended thoughts on the musical and its modern forms appear in the 38 page essay “Musical Mutations: Before, Beyond and Against Hollywood” (2000), available in its definitive and authorised form as Tier 2 PDF reward if you subscribe to my Patreon.

MORE Allen: Deconstructing Harry, Melinda and Melinda, Mighty Aphrodite, Small Time Crooks, Sweet and Lowdown, Bullets Over Broadway

© Adrian Martin 5 April 1997