This is a seriously weird movie. If you imagine merging the darker sides of “The Red Shoes” and “Black Swan”, throwing it into the “8 1/2” machine, blending it with “Synechdoche, New York” and then popping some pills before watching the result. Goodness, this is weird… Only in retrospect, after reading about the production history and learning that it is basically a film version of the director’s life while making a film about making … no: Bob Fosse did the double stunt of staging “Chicago” while directing his Lenny Bruce film, and it seems that pressure released some interesting creativity… it is fantasy about death and embracing death as a way out of all the pressures and burdens, it is a big video clip with gorgeous dance sequences, it is a dark twisted fantasy about the dream world that you can escape into to escape reality. It is about one self-defined larger-than-life director and his downward spiral. He has a stage play to stage, and a movie about a comedian to direct. All is carried by Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon, who is silent and majestic, sexy and sloppy, an egomaniac and a lover of life and of death.
A sometimes confused and often confusing celebration of art as a craft that requires full immersion from those who want to taste it, and a film that is beautiful to watch even when some of the bits and pieces do not fit together.
thomas4cinema 