A murderous psychopath mournfully sings his heart out in jail. A family living in a below-ground bunker chorus together about the end of the world. A lawyer belts out a number about gender re-assignment surgery. Welcome to the movie musical 2024 – a period, it seems, of radical reinvention for the genre. Never mind the ebullient nature of High Society and other Hollywood golden age musicals, film-makers are now turning to all-singin’, all-dancin’ spectaculars to express something much darker.
In Joker: Folie à Deux, the leftfield sequel to 2019’s Joker, Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga sing old standards such as Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered and That’s Entertainment! and, in some ways, turning this gloomy DC Comics-inspired take on Batman’s nemesis into a musical has a skewed logic. Think back to its predecessor and Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, in full Joker regalia, dancing his way down those steps near New York’s 167th Street Station to the anthemic stomp of Gary Glitter’s Rock’n’Roll (Part 2).
As director Todd Phillips said at the movie’s premiere in Venice, “Joaquin and I talked about all the time on the set of the first movie … this idea that Arthur has music in him. If you remember the first film, there are moments where he is just dancing for whatever the reason be. The way of expressing what he’s feeling.” A would-be stand§up comic, it makes sense that Fleck sees himself as a full-blown variety entertainer, however perverse it may be that he’s singing songs from musicals such as Pal Joey and The Band Wagon.
You might argue that Phoenix’s sullen songbird is little different to the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), as Jack Nicholson prances around Gotham Museum to the sound of Prince. But there’s something daring about following the incendiary Incel-baiting Joker with a film flush with musical numbers. Especially with Phoenix’s melancholic rasp paired with songstress Gaga, who previously won an Oscar for her song Shallow in Bradley Cooper’s 2018 A Star Is Born remake, and here plays Joker fangirl Lee Quinzel.
Pushing the boundaries of the musical further are The End and Emilia Pérez. The first fiction film by Joshua Oppenheimer, director of acclaimed documentary The Act of Killing, The End sees a misfit family living out their days in a cavernous shelter amid ecological catastrophe. That they were partly responsible for this – Michael Shannon’s patriarch was an energy baron – adds to the emotional currency, as these characters process extreme survivor guilt. “A film about storytelling and denial,” says Oppenheimer, “it’s through the songs that the characters try to convince themselves that their world is in order, that everything’s OK.”
Influenced particularly by the buoyant work of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the duo behind Oklahoma! and Carousel, Oppenheimer collaborated with theatre director Joshua Schmidt on the songs. “The End is the negative image of those golden age musicals,” suggests Oppenheimer, “which makes it a kind of ‘dark age’ musical, because instead of the songs carrying the deepest truths, it’s the silence that screams the truth. So when a character can’t sing any more and hits a wall of truth, that’s where the real truth comes forward.”
The musical’s light touch is the ideal way to process something heavyweight, as seen in Jacques Audiard’s spellbinding Emilia Pérez, a genre-bending musical that tells the story of a Mexican cartel boss who changes gender. The music and songs come courtesy of French team Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais. “Sometimes subjects are so touching, and sometimes so tough, that it’s better to wrap them in music and dance,” suggests Ducol. “In the case of Emilia Pérez in particular, the beauty is that the music itself explores different genres, from lyricism to rage, rock to slam, rap to folk, pop … it’s a kind of musical mosaic.”
Like the truth-spilling characters in The End or even Phoenix’s incarcerated killer, the singing in Emilia Pérez symbolises emotional rawness. “It’s the story of a character who allows herself to sing, who lets her heart speak,” adds Dalmais. “Emilia changes everything but her heart and it is her heart that will change the most. We literally see her start singing and we discover what it means to her. Until the end. It’s crucial for the characters to sing. It’s a strong act. Not only because it’s a performance. But because it also involves the vulnerability of each character.”
Admittedly, these films aren’t entirely unique. Musicals from the 1960s such as the counter-culture classic Hair and Cabaret dealt with, respectively, the Vietnam war era and the rise of nazism in 1930s Berlin. But it seems more and more film-makers are turning the form inside out. Currently in postproduction is Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, adapting the Tony-winning Broadway musical about two cellmates imprisoned in a Latin American dictatorship. Also mooted is Girl from the North Country, a Depression-era tale inspired by the songs of Bob Dylan, starring Olivia Colman.
For Ducol, at least, this is just the beginning of the movie musical revolution. “We often have the impression that we need subjects adapted to the musical genre, but I believe that, on the contrary, all stories can be told in song and dance,” he says. “Why not make an all-slam film, for example? And also a film in which all the ambient noises are rhythmic, like a giant percussion orchestra across the city, where everything is a beat? I like to see everyday life through this prism.” The dark age of musicals? Bring it on.