SING STREET B
Ireland Great
Britain USA (106 mi)
2016 ‘Scope d:
John Carney
I remember the 1980’s
with somewhat of a blush. No man’s hair
should be bigger than his girlfriend’s.
But that was the time. Dublin in
Technicolor. In reality it was
monochrome and in the grip of a recession, but on video tape, you could be
transported. You could wear what you
liked, and the more outrageous the better.
Anything to wind up the jackbooted skinheads on Dublin’s north
side. Make-up on a boy drove rockers
wild, and the teachers wilder. Thank God
for Bowie, who made all the black eyes okay.
And allowed people to find out who they were. My brother gave me the
gift of music through my first guitar.
We formed a band. In truth, at
the same stage, U2 were not as good as the kids in Sing Street. In truth most films you’ll see this year
won’t touch Sing Street…
Another musical fantasia from John Carney, former bass
player of the Irish rock band The Frames, while also shooting their music
videos, and creator of such optimistically appealing films as Once (2006)
and Begin
Again (2013), films that express how music inspires and changes people’s
lives, resorting to a more formulaic boy meets girl narrative this time, yet it
still retains the youthful exuberance of impressionable, coming-of-age kids
that dream of a better life. While it
has a kind of fairy tale feel throughout, often mixing in wish fulfillment
dream imagery, the dire social realist setting at its core grounds the film in
Dublin in the 1980’s during an economic recession, where the kids and their
parents actually feel stuck in time with no way out. With the feeling that life has passed them by
and left them by the wayside, 14-year old Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) and his
rebellious older brother Brendan, Jack Reynor, easily the best thing in the
film, a Jack Black style character from SCHOOL OF ROCK (2003) where an entire
film could be made around his character, have to endure the snide comments and
constant bickering of their hapless and loveless parents who only stay together
for financial reasons. While Brendan is
something of an outcast who stays stoned, holed up in his room with his record
collection, his brotherly advice, and exquisite taste in rock music, provides
the humor and synergistic push to keep Conor wanting more out of life than
anything he ever got. Like an alter-ego,
or a Jiminy Cricket voice of conscious, it’s really Brendan’s dream that Conor
follows, beautifully expressed here in a moment of brotherly pride and tough
love as he carves out a path for someone else to follow, Sing
Street Movie CLIP - Older Brother (2016) - Jack Reynor, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo
Movie HD (1:05). While Conor is pulled from private school and
sent to a nearby public school run by sadistic priests, he is quickly
acclimated to the predatory nature of things, where intelligence is ridiculed
and bullies prey on the weaknesses of others while priests turn a blind eye. The innocence of the times, however, is
reflected in the earliest stages of the music video, where Brendan is euphoric
how music is literally transformed through the power of images, SING STREET -
Duran Duran Clip - The Weinstein Company YouTube (1:09).
While Conor quickly gets picked on as well, an easy target
as he’s a good student, but he can’t help noticing the daily presence of a
gorgeous girl standing all alone, where nobody has the nerve to talk to her,
though apparently others have tried but gotten shut down. So Conor gives it a go, finding her
mysteriously alluring, Raphina (Lucy Boynton), asking if she wants to appear in
his video, claiming he’s a singer in a local rock band. Incredulously, she takes an interest, as she
turns out to be an aspiring model who could use the exposure. Like an answer to his prayers, Conor is dizzy
with delight afterwards, hardly able to contain himself, setting out
immediately in search of a group of musicians to form a band. Identifying his best friend, the diminutive
Darren (Ben Carolan) as the manager, his first recruit is a sensational
multi-talented instrumentalist Eamonn (Mark McKenna), who can apparently play
any instrument with ease, but serves primarily as the lead guitarist, choosing
a black dude Ngig (Percy Chamuruka) simply for his aloofness and look of cool,
but the guy can play keyboards. Before
you know it, they rehearse a bunch of 80’s cover songs in Eamonn’s living room and
record a demo tape. But when Brendan
hears it, he smashes it to pieces, calling cover music nothing more than junk,
claiming if they want to have sex with a girl they’ll have to take chances,
claiming rock music is all about attitude and risk, Sing
Street Exclusive Clip: The Last Thing the World Needs Is Another Cover Band
(1:03). With that, Conor and Eamonn turn
into a Lennon and McCartney writing team, reeling off several original songs,
where they finally have a reason to call Raphina and make that music video. It turns out she knows more than modeling,
adding hairstyles and make-up while reshaping the look of the band, even
changing Conor’s name to Cosmo, resulting in the raucously hilarious silliness
of a song recorded in a back alley somewhere, SING STREET -
THE RIDDLE OF THE MODEL Music Video Clip (1:45). With Ferdia Walsh-Peelo singing on all the
songs, the playfulness of the fun they’re having overshadows Conor’s original
motivation, finding time to be with the enthralling and strangely beguiling
girl.
Conor develops a new persona as Cosmo, suddenly familiar
with the likes and looks of Robert Smith in The
Cure - Inbetween Days on Vimeo (3:00), M - Pop Muzik (Official
Video) - YouTube (3:13), and Daryl Hall & John Oates
- Maneater - YouTube (4:24), growing his hair longer, bleaching his bangs and
wearing make-up to school, which the priests find an abomination and a direct
confrontation to their authoritarian rule, using brutally cruel, strong-armed
tactics to force him to capitulate.
While Conor is a somewhat opaque, sympathetic figure, where it’s hard to
find offense with anything he does, the more intriguing figures are Brendan,
whose musical mind is tapped into throughout, and the elusive beauty of
Raphina, whose inner complexity is surprising, as she is always more than she
seems, becoming a darker, more tragic figure over time, the damsel in distress
that is always worth fighting for. When
Conor reports to his brother that she already has a boyfriend, recalling that
they were listening to Genesis in his car, Brendan reminds him, “No girl is
ever going to take a guy seriously that listens to Genesis.” The on-again and off-again relationship that
develops between Raphina and Conor exists throughout, always dropping off tapes
of his new songs at her door, where she becomes the central force driving his
every move even as she disappears for long stretches of time. Meanwhile the band keeps popping up in their
own music videos, creating a lighthearted world of pop fantasy that is
continually challenged by the more searing realism of the times, where the
songs represent the only affirmative hope to be found anywhere in the vicinity,
SING STREET - BEAUTIFUL
SEA Music Video Clip YouTube (1:12).
These kids want nothing of the drab world surrounding them, where the
romantic inclinations between Conor and Raphina grow more magically surreal,
where the delirium of teenage love exists largely in the delusions of the
imagination, where some of the more brilliantly conceived scenes are just the
two of them alone, where the line between fantasy and reality continually
co-mingles. One of the better set pieces
in the film shows the band playing at the senior prom, creating a song that is
beat-for-beat the same rhythm section as “Maneater” in Drive It Like You Stole It -
YouTube (3:37), where what exists in Conor’s head grows to ecstatic dimensions,
always infused with a hyper-realistic romanticism that becomes the guiding
light of the film, idealizing a kind of world one hopes and dreams for, as
opposed to the one they inevitably find themselves stuck in, SING STREET - Adam Levine
"Go Now" Music Video - YouTube (3:50). With a belief that brighter days are ahead,
the magical realism of the finale is as tragically naïve as it is exhilarating,
where one is left in a euphoric haze of youth and unbridled enthusiasm.
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