I Want My Arm About You, The Charm About You

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I think the highest compliment I personally could pay The Artist is that I immediately wanted to go and watch a musical when it was over. If you know me, then you know I don't want to go and watch musicals. Ever, really. But there's a tap routine at the end of The Artist that is one of the most joyous things you're going to see in any film this year, and so there I was at the end, seriously contemplating going home and watching something like Top Hat.

The second highest compliment I can give The Artist is that I didn't go home and watch Top Hat; I went home and watched Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The score to The Artist flirts with Bernard Hermann music for that 1958 Hitch flick through it's entire running time, which seemed a strange pick to me, until the last reel where the movie stops flirting with Hermann's score and actually starts using Hermann's score itself. And that seemed really strange to me. I couldn't really figure out why this modern take on a silent movie would go the Vertigo route.

Until I got home and put in Vertigo and remembered that there are long stretches of Vertigo that are essentially a silent film - it barrels through a heap of exposition in the first twenty minutes, and then for long periods we just watch Scottie drive around following Madeleine as that beautiful beautiful music swells in the background.

So we've got a 2011 film pretending to be a silent film from the 20s referencing a pseudo-silent film from the 50s... and somehow it makes sense, ultimately. Because The Artist is a love letter to Hollywood, to the history of film-making and a respect for the technologies of the past. Hitchcock came out of silent films and his camera was always trying to tell the story itself, in place of words as much as possible.

But he was also one of the pioneers of sound - consider the scene in "Knife!" scene in Blackmail:

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Point being, it makes more sense for The Artist to score a portion of itself to Vertigo than it did at first glance, and these are the thoughts I've been thinking since seeing the movie last night. So what a gift, right? That is this movie's gift to us, sending us off on little scavenger hunts of cinematic delight like this. I'm sure there are a thousand more references bouncing around in this baby that are just waiting to be played with.

Oh and Jean Dujardin is like flashbulbs bursting in your eyeballs. He's every inch the movie star the movie demands and then sixteen swaggering steps further. Total hammy megawatted perfection. If I have a complaint to voice about the film it's that I never fell for his partner in love and tap shoes played by Bérénice Bejo quite as deeply as I did for him, and so the love story seemed a little bit lopsided. Not terribly so, it wasn't ruinous, but she was a layer or two of less sparkle than him. He should've ended up with Beth Grant, is my point.

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