Oh! You pretty things!

Film: Hair

I don’t like musicals very much. Not the old golden age ones, I never knew how to enjoy in long sequences of Gene Kelly or Fred Astair displaying their dancing skills. I enjoyed some Boliwood musicals (and in Boliwood, every movie is a musical) but more for the awkward and campy fun of their music, coreography and moviemaking altogether. I dig older Disney animated movies, even those with a lot of music, but I somehow skip those parts instead of getting into songs. I tend to think that songs usually unnecessarily slow down the story. And modern musicals are so rare that I don’t even get to have a particular opinion of them.

On the other hand, “Hair” is one of my favourite films of all times. It’s one of those movies that I can watch thousand times without getting bored. And it’s a musical, with lot of music. “Hair” hasn’t got much of a story, so there’s nothing to slow down. Instead, it offers a document of the period, influential in music as well as in politics, lifestyle, culture. A document from the fair distance (movie was made in 1979), which allows it one unpretentious look, critical towards heroes of the age, though also very affectionate – not as nearly naive attitude as the from “Easy Rider” (“They can do it, man”). Music is a must, because music was a crucial element of life more than in any period of history.

Film is based on the cult theatre musical of 60ies of the same name, played in almost every country of the western world at the time. Directop is Milos Forman, great Czechoslovakian director. Forman made relatively small number of movies, but made each of them masterpieces. Starting off in his homeland, he made three movies, of which two were defining pieces for specific Czechoslovakian approach to comedies. One, “Lasky jedne plavovlasky” (“Loves of a blonde”); The other, “Hori, ma panenko” (hilarious title “Burn, my baby, burn” was translated into descriptive but unimaginative “Fireman’s ball”). After his first American movie “Taking off”, he managed to make four cult movies, masterpieces in a string, in period of 1975 to 1985. Those were “One flew over cuckoo’s nest”, “Hair”, “Ragtime” and “Amadeus”. His latest successes are “People vs. Larry Flint” and “Man on the moon”. It is his careful choice and wide variety of themes and settings in his previous movies that make me wonder: Why two biographical movies in a row, both biographies of controversial people, and both in many ways alike? Anyway, that’s not the topic. The topic is “Hair”.

The movie starts with famous opening sequence with the song “Aquarius” and, with it’s mass choreography, takes energy right from the play. But then, dancers step back to give us a chance to see Claude Bukowsky (John Savage of “Deer hunter”), a naive farmboy, summoned to New Your fby army draft, walking through the Central Park. In a charming sequence, he meets a group of hippies lead by Berger (Treat Williams), and minutes after that, a rich heiress Sheila (Beverly D’Angelo, previously rock singer and Hannah-Barbera cartoonist) tackles his inte

posted by Srdjan @ 4:48 PM