It's magnificent, but it's not a movie.

Rating: Null/10 (22 September 2005)

Witnessing the charge of the doomed Light Brigade against Russian artillery, the French general Rene Bosquet famously remarked: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre" - "It's magnificent, but it's not war". After watching 'Singin' in the Rain' again yesterday, I'm strangely left with a similar feeling  it's magnificent, but it's not really a movie, is it? That is to say, although it is on the outset even a movie about movies, about Hollywood and about the making of movies, it's not really cinematic. 'Singin' in the Rain', for all its spectacle, just doesn't do what great movies, in my mind, do and ought to do  namely, tell a story in a way that is specific to the movie as a form. Of course, the dancing is wonderful, but it strikes me as being a beefed-up Broadway show put on the screen.
Don't get me wrong. I love this movie. I absolutely adore it. It's like a birthday party with cake and soda for two hours straight. So, this isn't really offered as negative criticism, at least I don't think so, because I really don't want to speak badly about something wonderful. It's more a kind of puzzlement.
What is the specifically cinematic anyway? Well, it's hard to say, as it could be a lot of things, but let's look briefly at one possibility. If you look at Bergman, for instance, (yes, an unfair comparison if ever there was one), you'll find the cinematic in an exploration of the unification of photography and theatre  the two antithetic sources of cinema. Yes, if you want to play Hegelian, you could say that there is dialectic here. Theatre is the theses  it's all about the forward movement of the plot in time, it's action-packed, it's a temporal art form. The action is viewed at a distance. We know characters by their actions. The antithesis is photography. Here we have slices of time, extrapolated from movement and frozen in single moments. Photography makes close-ups possible. It allows a different way of knowing people. It lets us look for an essence, a timelessness in them, by way of the exploration of portraits. The synthesis of these two forms is the cinema, realized at it's height by Bergman in movies like 'Scenes from a Marriage', and perhaps above all 'Cries and Whispers'. Perhaps it reaches it's peak (or perhaps it goes too far and turns back on itself) in the relatively unknown 'Karin's Face', which consist of a series of photographs, a montage.
The cinematic could be a lot of other things as well, of course. In Fellini it is produced by the way the scenes are linked and cut. But I won't go further with this now.
Anyway, Singin in the Rain, despite taking movies as it's very theme, never becomes cinematic. It never moves beyond the theatre. There are hardly a close-up of a face throughout the movie. Those that are there seems either just not important, like the one of Gene Kelly in the beginning, or actually attempts to turn the face into another comical prop by treating it as a plastic instrument, distorting it, actually removing human personality from it  I'm referring to the, admittedly side-splittingly hilarious, funny faces made by Donald O'Connor.
Well, I don't know I could be way off the mark here, it was just something that occurred to me. In any event, I'm still rating it a 10, because, cinematic or not, it's still magnificent... whatever it is.