Into the Woods (1991)

INTO THE WOODS – made for TV, PBS American Playhouse          B              
USA  (153 mi)  1991  d:  James Lapine

I was raised to be charming, not sincere.        —The Prince (Robert Westerberg)

One of the most endearing of all Stephen Sondheim musicals, a magical experience largely because of its universal accessibility, one that pokes fun of children’s fairy tales, imagining them with different outcomes than ending happily ever after, premiering on Broadway on November 5, 1987.  Divided into two halves, separated by an Intermission, the first half fits the audiences expectations by ingeniously combining several classic fairy tales, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Jack and the Beanstalk, with a sarcastic narrator (Tom Aldredge) dressed in a suit visibly seen standing off to the side of the stage advancing the stories with a polished relish, while in the second half, when the familiar suddenly turns unrecognizable, elements of death and stark realism are added, where the story grows darker with a chilling despair that haunts the surviving characters, suddenly cut off from their families and homes, left to fend for themselves in a changing world.  Music and lyrics by Sondheim, with a clever story written by James Lapine, the production won three Tony Awards, Best Score, Best Book (Story), and Best Actress in a Musical (Joanna Gleason as the Baker’s wife, whose deadpan timing is a joy to behold) in a year dominated by The Phantom of the Opera, winner of seven Tony awards, becoming the longest running Broadway show in history.  Collaborating with Lapine, the writer has a taste for visually oriented theater, where their first musical together about pointillist painter Georges Seurat was Sunday in the Park with George, in 1984, winning two Tony awards for design, while Sondheim and Lapine won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  Lapine also directs the film, attempting to recreate the Broadway experience by simply filming a performance in front of a live audience, but the suffocatingly narrow and confined limitations of a fixed camera with a zoom lens moving in and out, but not panning from side to side (where interestingly the stage moves instead of the camera), prevents an overall view of depth and breadth of the entire stage, losing much of the three dimensional aspects of movement, as there are plenty of scene changes within a scene, often losing connection with characters, where the visual effect throughout is everything feels flattened out.  This is the same problem with filming operas (appearing regularly in movie theaters nowadays), where these specific theatrical performances were meant to be experienced live in theaters where the sound reverberates throughout the music hall. 

Ostensibly a story about a childless Baker (Chip Zien) and his wife (Gleason) and their magical quest to begin a family, fighting off a curse placed upon them years ago by an ugly Witch (Bernadette Peters, a delight in one of her best roles), who has herself been cursed, collecting several items the Witch demands to reverse the curse while interacting with other storybook characters throughout the journey.  With music tying all these elements together, the opening sequence of heading “Into the Woods” draws in many of the featured characters, including Little Red Riding Hood (Danielle Ferland, who ultimately becomes knife-wielding and cynical) snatching as many cookies as she can grab in the bakery before she’s off to her grandmother’s house, a somewhat dimwitted neighbor Jack (Ben Wright) who through impoverished circumstances is forced by his mother to take his best friend, a cow named Milky White (an inanimate object), to the market for money, while Cinderella (Kim Crosby) is seen fleeing through the woods wearing slippers of gold while escaping from the Prince (Robert Westerberg, who doubles as the wolf, and after meeting on the set ironically goes on to marry Cinderella/Kim Crosby in real life afterwards) after the luxurious ball, a recurring event that happens on each of three consecutive nights.  The First Act plays out like a delightful run-on sentence, continually getting carried away with one idea, which overlaps into another, and another, creating waves of interconnecting sequences that are humorously developed through complicated musical lyrics that are given the Sondheim touch, where he is a master of cleverly crafting music and lyrics specifically tailored to the characters and situations within his musicals.  Perhaps setting the absurdly ridiculous tone for the story is one of the more memorable musical numbers, a duet of dueling princes in “Agony,” Into the Woods - "Agony" - YouTube (2:39), one (Chuck Wagner) who can’t fathom how to steal away Rapunzel locked in her tall tower with no doors and the other whose fair maiden keeps eluding his grasp at the ball, something he finds unthinkable, where he attributes it to “madness,” each an exaggerated caricature of what a Prince Charming is supposed to be, yet each bemoaning the opposition they encounter as if it were a fate worse than death.  But that’s only a prelude for worse catastrophes yet to come.  When the Witch discovers the Prince has romantic inclinations with Rapunzel, she begs her daughter not to leave her, as the world outside is filled with trouble and heartache, "Stay with Me" - Into The Woods (1991 ... - YouTube (2:46), becoming one of the best songs ever written about parental loss.  When Rapunzel refuses, however, the Witch angrily blinds the Prince, cuts off Rapunzel's hair and banishes her to the desert. 

Part of the beauty of the play is how well the audience is initially comforted by the opening act, where everyone finds what they’re looking for, as the Bakers have a child, the Witch has regained her beauty, Cinderella has married the Prince and lives in a castle, Little Red Riding Hood has defeated the Wolf, and Jack and his mother are no longer poor, as the magic beans received for the cow have brought them riches, where “once upon a time” has led to “happily ever after” and all is seemingly right with the world.  At the Intermission, audiences are likely to be smiling.  But the second act literally transforms the play, as something devilishly clever aspires to something even greater, where simply following one’s customary storybook destiny without having to make difficult choices is not in the cards, as that is not how life works.  Despite achieving what they set out to, everyone seems happy on the outside, but underneath they all still yearn for something more, where the Bakers fret about not having enough room for a new family, while Cinderella may actually be growing bored with the Prince, and Rapunzel, despite being freed from the tower, wanders aimlessly in the desert, where her blind Prince somehow finds her there, regaining his sight from her tears and marries her on the spot, but she’s grown hysterical.  Both Prince Charmings continue to romance other women, betraying their wives in the process, but this is all they know.  While Jack initially chopped down the beanstalk, leaving a Giant dead in their backyard, a new Giant is detected from another beanstalk, a Lady Giant who’s fuming over the loss of her husband and wants the child responsible handed over to her.  In her wrath, she destroys the castle, steps on Grandmother’s house, and causes the death of the Baker’s wife.  In regaining her beauty, the Witch has lost her powers to defend against such a formidable creature, singing the “Last Midnight” in their darkest hour, leaving them seemingly at the mercy of the Lady Giant, many having lost their homes and their loved ones.  This heartache and tragedy is reflected in one of Sondheim’s greatest songs, “No One Is Alone,” where Cinderella comforts Little Red Riding Hood while the Baker consoles Jack after he’s lost his mother, trying to keep his anger from swelling up into vengeance.  In the end only a few survive, but they are visited by the spirits of the ones they lost, where the Witch, of all people, delivers the moral of the story, singing one of the most beautifully heartfelt songs, “Children Will Listen,” before they all collectively return to the introductory main theme song, “Into the Woods.”  These complex characterizations are the heart of the story, as Sondheim brings the unfamiliar into the familiar, where this is one of his more audience pleasing and ingeniously created works.  By the end, we feel intimately connected to the characters, mixing comic wit, savage satire, and pure tragedy into their otherwise fortuitous lives, bringing them to the edge of the apocalypse where their world, as they and we in the audience know it, is completely destroyed and they must find a new way to survive outside the safely protected confines of fairy tales and illusion. 

Wild

Author Cheryl Strayed (left) and actress Reese Witherspoon  

Cheryl Strayed  

WILD              B-                   

USA  (115 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Jean-Marc Vallée          Official site

I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.

—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, 2012

Adapted from the 2012 memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, this is a case where literature is the better format than film, as most of the story is told through seemingly disconnected, stream-of-conscious thoughts that continually feel fragmented in the film, randomly pulled together through music and flashback sequences, but it all feels so cliché’d, especially the choices of music, which are mere snippets, where the audience never gets a feel for how or why this journey is so essential, other than on a superficial level.  It’s not unusual for people’s lives to fall apart from time to time, but this is certainly an unusual method to put the missing pieces back together again.  By the end, despite the grand poetic gesture, supposedly finding transcendence in the final moment, there’s little reason to believe this character is really any different, as she’s always been the sum of her parts.  The film pales in comparison to the male counterpart, Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), where the characters throughout are more deeply fleshed out and complex, offering more memorable performances, where here it feels more like a mother and daughter film, where neither one is fully revealed, but remain abstract configurations.  Reese Witherspoon purchased the rights to the book, while Oprah listed it on her Oprah's Book Club 2.0 in June, 2012, becoming a #1 best seller for seven weeks, where Witherspoon plays the lead character (author Cheryl Strayed) and is also a producer on the film.  While the backstory is only revealed in flashback, the film counts off the days in 1995 as 26-year old Cheryl begins her journey alone in the Mohave Desert near the Mexican border and follows the Pacific Crest Trail through the mountainous terrain of the Sierra Nevada in California and the southern end of the Cascade Range in Oregon, where hikers have to make sure they complete enough miles every day to reach the opposite end of the trail before weather conditions make snowy sections impassable, targeting several resupply points en route to stock up on food and water, until reaching the Bridge of the Gods traversing the Columbia River at the border of Washington, the lowest elevation of the entire 1100-mile journey that took over 3-months.  While the feat is not to be minimized, something very few could actually accomplish, nonetheless the film itself minimizes the difficulty of the journey and instead attempts to reveal the unfolding narrative through the restlessness anxiety of her interior world.    

While Cheryl Strayed is a novelist and essayist, someone extremely familiar with words and language, this adaptation by Nick Hornby is a poor substitute, as the various sequences never feel connected, but remain isolated moments, as people Cheryl meets along the road simply vanish from view without a word, where they, along with her memories, are like ghosts following her along the trail, where they never materialize into living, breathing human beings that matter to the audience.  Instead, the camera focuses entirely on Cheryl 100% of the time, where everything else is incidental, even the vastness of the wilderness, beautifully photographed by Yves Bélanger, where despite the continuing timeline, there is no real comprehension of time and distance, as the film really takes place inside her head.  While the experience is a document of mood swings, resembling Danny Boyle’s 127 HOURS (2010), it lacks that film’s intensity and sense of desperation as well as the degree of difficulty encountered, though both rely upon the interior world of flashbacks.  In the end it becomes a road movie, where Cheryl’s initial encounters with her own naiveté reflect just how angry and unprepared she is to make such an extreme journey, where the F-word is littered throughout, but she receives needed help and excellent advice along the way.  One of the more unusual scenes is seeing Cheryl and Paul (Thomas Sadoski), her husband of seven years, getting matching tattoos, something they can share forever even as it comes on the day they are getting divorced.  Their familiarity with each other is touching, especially when Cheryl acknowledges she cheated on him, obviously recognizing the cost at that moment, adding that she actually cheated on him a lot.  This may be their closest moment together throughout the film, though it only hints at her own personal descent into reckless drug abuse and a rampant proclivity for sleeping around with any man that so much as looks at her.  Much of these self-destructive experiences are narrated as she hikes along the trail, becoming a parallel world of soul searching through her past that she carries with her throughout her long and arduous ordeal.

Perhaps the heart of the film is her close relationship with her mother Bobbi, Laura Dern, who rescued her and her little brother from an abusive and alcoholic father, yet maintained her dignity and self-esteem throughout the ensuing years of struggle, sacrificing all to make sure her children had a brighter future than her own, suggesting she would never change a thing if it produced something as beautiful as her two children, but she dies quickly at the age of 45 after being diagnosed with lung cancer, fueling a period of rage and self-destruction.  Her own history of sexual violation leaves her even more exposed as a lone traveler through such remote territory, where she has to instantly assess her encounters with various men, where the possibility of sexual violence is always on the back of her mind, yet it’s the terrain she’s chosen to navigate on her own terms.  What’s perhaps most surprising is how few negative encounters she has, where most everyone she meets is helpful and overly friendly, except for a couple of leering, beer guzzling DELIVERANCE (1972) guys carrying bows and arrows, who find it most peculiar to run into a woman alone in the woods, though we never get a clear picture of just how much time is spent alone.  When she wanders into the heart of civilization, where a guy is passing out flyers for a musical tribute to Jerry Garcia, who just passed away, she jolts at the closeness of his physical presence, something she’s obviously not been used to for several months, where she has to recalibrate her bearings.  But apparently it’s like riding a bike, as in no time she’s hopped into the sack with the same guy, heading back out the next morning.  Particularly because she crosses through some of the prime real estate for pot growing in America, one wonders what might have been cleaned up for the movie, as drug use is not uncommon for back packers in that neck of the woods, but this subject is completely glossed over without incident.  While we assume Cheryl has gone through some psychological trajectory, this is never evident, though a final sequence attempts to grow increasingly transcendent without ever actually rising to the moment.  It recalls a more dramatically compelling bridge sequence at the end of Chris Eyre’s SMOKE SIGNALS (1997), where both films attempt to reconcile the violence and discord of their pasts with a Siddhartha-like moment of self-realization. 

The Homesman

THE HOMESMAN                 B-                   

USA  France  (122 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Tommie Lee Jones       Official Facebook

A film weighed down by the seriousness of its own efforts, an old-fashioned western that dramatizes the emptiness of the frontier landscape and the seeming impossibility of surviving under the brutally harsh conditions of the American West, especially for women.  While the feminist bent is well-intentioned, and the cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto is ravishing throughout, the film is simply too downbeat for its own good, always carrying an extra load of unnecessary baggage inherited from the demands of such an inhospitable storyline.  Never allowing the audience in, the film instead forces the viewer into miserably unhappy territory and then leaves them there with no way out, a Sartrian existential No Exit debacle, becoming one of the gloomier and most depressing films seen this year, literally a portrait of hell on earth.  Leading us through this psychological world of endless suffering is Hillary Swank as Mary Bee Cuddy, a frontierswoman living alone on the prairie, beholden to no one, seemingly a free spirit, yet she carries the burden of moral righteousness around her shoulders like an insufferable weight, a Florence Nightingale of social reform, a predecessor to the Women's Christian Temperance Union, yet she is stuck in the Nebraska Territory of the 1820’s and 30’s, an era rarely depicted in motion pictures as there’s nothing exotic or romanticized about the bleakness of the times, where every day is living and dying through the dreariness of a great depression.  Because of her unattached social status as the town spinster, Mary Bee is handed (by the church) the thankless task of transporting three crazy women on a long and arduous journey across the desolate Territory back to the civilization of Iowa where they can be handed over to a Methodist Church that is willing to care for them. 

These women have all been driven into insanity by the harshness of the times and the callous indifference of their husbands, a reference right out of John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS (1956), removing the racist angle of being abducted white women raised by Indians and therefore rejected by the moral sanctity of white civilization.  Here 19-year old Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep) has lost three children to diphtheria, fiercely clutching to a rag doll (also in Ford) in a near catatonic state, while Theoline Belknap (Miranda Otto) threw her newborn into the outhouse after the family farm failed, and Gro Svendsen (Sonja Richter) suffers from delusions of evil, who is so violent to herself or others that she needs to continuously be tied up.  The idea of Mary Bee, a straight-laced, strong, and indomitable woman transporting these women alone across such a barren wasteland is equally crazy in the eyes of the wary townsfolk, as few believe she will succeed, including her town minister (John Lithgow) who instead offers his prayers.  As she rounds up her cargo one by one, placing them inside a locked wooden box with iron guarded windows, like a mobile prison on wheels, she happens upon a miserable wretch in an even more precarious position than her own, a man tied to a tree with a noose around his neck while sitting, hands tied behind him, on a horse, whose slightest movement suggests his unfortunate end is near.  He is none other than George Briggs (Tommie Lee Jones), a morally dubious, contemptible lowlife drifter who happens to be a claim jumper, stealing another man’s property while he’s gone back East “to find himself a wife.”  Taking advantage of his desperate position, namely having no other options, she makes him promise to help her throughout her long and difficult journey.  While he’s something of an ornery cuss who doesn’t like what he bargained for, in this mythic American West, a man doesn’t go back on his word. 

If this film does anything, it provides a visual depiction of flatness as an unforgiving plain that stretches to an endless horizon, offering little in the way of hope or vegetation, where the idea of surviving out in this arid wilderness seems remote.  Unlike Kelly Reichardt’s Meek's Cutoff (2010), the film is not about the minutia of daily survival, or a claustrophobic world closing in, but more closely resembles Jones’s earlier effort THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA (2005), shot on the director’s own property, another film about transporting human cargo across uncivilized territory, where the beauty of the film is the journey, set against desert landscapes with only traces of water, where sheer fortitude is the only thing that gets them through.  Unfortunately, this film has a weary feeling of aimlessness about it, missing the taut direction of his earlier effort.  While there are dangerous encounters along the way, not to mention the lingering possibility of starvation or Indian attack, Briggs offers some degree of frontier wisdom along with his eccentric behavior, obstinate and stubborn in his steadfast refusal to do any more than absolutely necessary, forcing Mary Bee to carry the load, where tending to the deteriorating minds of the three women is a loathsome proposition, a burden she’s forced to endure alone.  While she’s a model of consistency and moral piety, Mary Bee begins to suffer from outright loneliness, where the human condition surrounding her is a sorry state, offering no respite from the enveloping purgatory that is her plight.  As fate would have it, she is crushed under the weight of her own good intentions, a mythological Icarus flying too close to the sun. 

While Briggs has every intention to abandon those women, offering their cruel fates to the winds, he has a change of conscience, feeling obligated to live up to Mary Bee’s sheer persistence, if only through stubborn resolve.  While it’s possible they all perished out in the wilderness, as out of death comes the surreal, where the rest of the journey has the feel of a dream, where much like an apparition or a mirage, Briggs happens upon a newly constructed, freshly painted hotel out in the middle of nowhere, but they refuse food or lodging to such depraved souls as they are preparing for an evening banquet for wealthy entrepreneurs who will develop a civilized town where emptiness currently sits.  This kind of indifference of the wealthy is not a stranger to the impoverished, but after witnessing this harrowing ordeal, it’s beneath contempt.  Nonetheless, life goes on, and Briggs survives only in the manner that he’s accustomed to, namely violating all known ethical conduct, eventually crossing the Missouri River into what resembles the land of Oz — Iowa, which may as well be heaven, a perfectly manicured and pristine community where everything is neatly in place, handing over his tainted ladies (along with letters of family contacts) to the wife of the Methodist minister, none other than Meryl Streep, whose astonishment at their arrival melts into open generosity, where in this depiction, human kindness is a surreal sign of a civilized future, leaving Briggs an outcast, like Ethan Edwards in THE SEARCHERS, and like Custer’s last stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn where the Indians cut his eyes out, unable to see the spirit world, left to blindly wander lost in an inhospitable neverland for eternity.

Swim Little Fish Swim

SWIM LITTLE FISH SWIM               B                     

USA  France  (95 mi)  2013  d:  Lola Bessis and Ruben Amar        Official site

An offbeat coming-of-age movie written, directed, and produced by a husband and wife team that is actually about the choices made by young child/adults as they navigate their way into adulthood, as if it is a foreign territory to be avoided at all costs, where the perilous consequences are likely to be unalterable once entered.  This is a film where things happen not in any particular order, but in the randomness of the moment, where caught up in this idiosyncratic world are Leeward (Dustin Guy Defa), a perennially unemployed musician that appears to exist out of the 60’s or even an earlier era, as he routinely allows strange people to crash in their home, spends all day making music with friends and neighbors, and has little thought about personal responsibilities, though he seems to be a devoted father to his young 4-year old daughter that he insists upon calling Rainbow (Olivia Costello).  Mary (Brooke Bloom) is a full-time nurse that has to work extended hours just to make ends meet, whose nerves are tested by the seemingly anything-goes philosophy of her husband, who she finds lazy and irresponsible, an overgrown adolescent who seems incapable of holding down a job, though she believes he’s certainly talented enough musically, as he writes songs all the time, but refuses to get paid for them, while insisting upon calling their daughter by her real name, Maggie.  Into this blissful existence comes Lilas (Lola Bessis, co-writer and director), a perky young French artist struggling to find her way into the New York artworld and the daughter of a world famous painter (Anne Consigny) in Paris.  What each of these characters has in common is their perception of feeling misunderstood, believing they are doing the right thing for the right reasons, but feeling lost and alone as no one else seems to care. 

The film has an interesting New York City vibe to it, centered around the East Village filled with Bohemian artists, street musicians, rollerblade skaters and the everpresent bustle of street activities, much of it taking place in a cramped Chinatown apartment that seems to attract a myriad of people when Leeward is home during the daytime, most all of whom are ushered out when Mary arrives back home, completely flustered at having to deal with all these strange people.  One of these is Lilas, a video artist that walks around the streets of the city with a portable projector in hand, who is promised a spot on the living room couch for a few days, much to the chagrin of Mary, who is rarely allowed to crack a smile, as she’s the only one working to pay for the supposed comforts of others.  After a bit of browbeating, she gets Leeward to agree to check out a job writing music for a commercial, something that wouldn’t particularly be that hard for him, but Leeward has an anti-capitalist bent about him, a holdover from the more radical leanings of his grandmother we later learn, who encourages him every step of the way to walk to the beat of his own drum irregardless what others think.  Mary, however, is led to believe he is performing the required work assignment and is in line to receive a hefty paycheck, so on her own she explores a cute little house in the suburbs of Jersey City, thinking this could finally become a reality.  Instead, however, it’s Lilas that is having an effect on her husband’s choices, both struggling artists, where they mutually agree they should simply quit stalling and go for it, where Lilas intends to get an art exhibition at MoMA PS1, a move that could extend her expiring VISA, as it would make her a working artist, while Leeward makes arrangements to cut his first record in a studio.  Simultaneously, each pursues their own dream while concealing it from a significant other. 

While the film is about freedom and self-expression, often expressed in a joyous communal celebration, it’s also a film of emotional neglect, as Lilas’s overcontrolling mother is more used to telling her daughter what to do instead of listening to her, while Leeward is tone deaf to his wife’s increasing stress about their financial hardships, where she’s tired of living hand to mouth while supporting the entire neighborhood.  When Mary gets serious about making a down payment on a house, it’s out of desperation for a better future, concerns that Leeward simply ignores, as he’s too caught up pursuing his own dreams.  Their daughter, despite the mixed signals, seems to be happy and content, where Lilas takes to her like a long lost daughter she never had, while Maggie seems to be thrilled by all the activity taking place in her home very day.  To that end, filmmaker Nathan Punwar contributes stunning Super 8 video footage that is tastefully interspersed throughout the interweaving narrative, that may as well be a world seen through a child’s eye, filled with bright colors and an unmistakable magic and charm.  While each is trying to achieve something they want, including the build-up of their own heightened expectations, reality can be a sobering reminder of how difficult dreams are to achieve.  As it happens, Lilas’s mother is planning an exhibit of her own at MOMA in New York, asking her daughter to come help out, but she’s disappointed to learn that her own project has been short circuited, denied a place in the exhibit, sending her back into the control of her mother.  Undeterred, she does so on her own terms, using the moment to express herself anyway, even if no one’s listening, an affect that finally gets her mother’s attention.  This is one of those quirky little films that is all about wacky artists, absurd personalities, and lofty ambitions that wind up with an altogether different expression than anything imagined, becoming, of all things, an intriguing family drama about the worth of each individual, with an appropriate musical soundtrack accredited to Toys and Tiny Instruments.  

J’ai Été au Bal / I Went to the Dance

Amédé Ardoin  

Dennis McGee  

Cléoma and Joseph Falcon  

Marc and Ann Savoy  

Dewey Balfa, Marc Savoy, and D.J. Menard  

D.J. Menard  

Michael Doucet  

Alphonse “Bois Sec” Ardoin (nephew of Amédé Ardoin)  

Canray Fontenot  

Queen Ida  

Clifton Chenier  

King of the Zydeco  

Michael Doucet  

Director Les Blank  

J'AI ÉTÉ AU BAL / I WENT TO THE DANCE          B+                  

aka:  French Dance Tonight (abridged version shown on PBS American Experience)

USA  (84 mi)  1989  d:  Les Blank    co-director:  Chris Strachwitz

Perhaps the definitive film on Cajun and zydeco music from Southern Louisiana, co-directed by Chris Strachwitz, the founder of Arhoolie Records who was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship in 2000, Blank provides an insider perspective that both outlines and interprets the history of Cajun and Creole music.  Featuring vintage photographs and recordings as well as recollections of musicians from within the culture itself, including commentary from Marc Savoy of Eunice, Louisiana, a highly regarded accordion player, and Michael Doucet, a fiddler, singer, songwriter and historian who founded the Cajun band BeauSoleil from Lafayette, Louisiana, also awarded a National Heritage Fellowship in 2005, the film is a tribute to the cultural roots and a joyous celebration of the music.  The film has no real beginning or end, is no frills, where nothing is the least bit showy or pretentious, but simply records musicians and singers as they sit on a milk crate in someone’s backyard and perform songs, usually with a fiddle or an accordion, while all around them barnyard animals are roaming about, like chickens, roosters, sheep, cows, ducks, horses and cats while laundry can be seen hanging on a line.  The Acadians (aka Cajuns) are French descendents from Nova Scotia, where nearly 12,000 were exiled from Canada by the British in the 1750’s when they were suspected of aiding the French, due to their language similarities, traveling great distance when they migrated to Louisiana, which was a French colony at the time, bringing with them Celtic traditions that soon mixed with Indians, free people of color and the Louisiana Creole people, who were predominately influenced by the West Indies and Africa, providing the original roots of Cajun culture in southwest Louisiana.  

While the fiddle seems to have been the instrument of choice in Cajun music, the accordion was introduced into early sound recordings of the 1920’s, where Joe Falcon, a white accordion player recorded the first Cajun song in 1928, Allons à Lafayette, (heard here:  Lafayette) before touring across Texas and southern Louisiana with his wife Cléoma ("Joe Falcon & Cleoma Breaux from an invaluable Cajun MP3 website playing vintage 78 recordings), while Creole musician Amédé Ardoin, a sharecropper at a nearby farm, was known for his high-pitched vocals and considerable dexterity on the instrument, becoming a frequent performer at dances, playing mostly for white audiences.  Ardoin met Dennis McGee, a white fiddler from Eunice, forming one of the first biracial duos, making their first recording together December 9, 1929 in New Orleans (Amédé Ardoin & Dennis McGee: Blues du Basile) while often performing at house parties, driven in a horse-drawn carriage provided by the plantation owners.  After falling out of favor from the mid 30’s to 1950, accordian music was rejuvenated in the late 1940’s by returning war veterans, where traditional music was influenced by rhythm and blues, where the Creole black offshoot of Zydeco music was born, a blues and dance music featuring the accordion along with the percussive sound of metal spoons on a corrugated tin rub board, where the foremost practitioner was Clifton Chenier, known as the King of the Zydeco, with his brother Cleveland on spoons (six in each hand).   

      

Blank was born in Tampa, Florida but studied English at Tulane University in New Orleans, going to graduate school in writing at Berkeley in California, but returned to Tulane for a masters in playwriting.  But after seeing Bergman’s THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957), Blank discovered a love for making films, making a number of educational and industrial movies after completing film school at USC.  According to an interview with Mary Tutwiler from The Ind, March 23, 2010, Les Blank screening at AcA - IND Media - theIND.com: 

I used to work summers on a sea-going tug boat in the Gulf, between Tampa, my home, and Texas and Mobile and New Orleans and on one trip, I got off in New Orleans and saw the sights and a friend of mine from school lived here and we saw the French Quarter and I was living in an all boy’s prep school at the time and I thought this was a pretty interesting place. I came to school here after high school. I wanted to play football. It wasn’t the best place for academics...but that’s how I got here.

When I was at Tulane, those were the days when Cajuns were under the carpet somewhere, you didn’t talk about them much, they were kind of a mythical creature who lived back in the bayous. On the radio in New Orleans, there was a radio commercial for Tichenor’s Antiseptic, the chords and the music were Cajun sounding, it was sort of dissonant sounding but to my mind a pleasing, catching kind of music. On the football team, there were a couple of Cajuns and I noticed they were quite different from everybody else and I enjoyed their outlook and their humor and their kind of crazy sensibilities. And they told me about these dance halls out in the woods and I thought this would be interesting, so my girlfriend and I drove over there, and I attended one of these functions down a dirt road in an old barn type building made out of old wood and the floor was jam-packed with people dancing around in a circle and sweating and the beer was really cold and they were doing the two-step and everybody was in perfect sync with one another and every time they hit their feet down on the floor, the whole floor would cave in and bounce back up. They didn’t speak much English at all. I was studying French, I could get by, I could get my beer ordered and I had a lot of fun. It made a deep impression on me. I wanted to come back and do something later.

I was in Houston, doing an industrial film for a Gulfport tube company that makes oil pipes. To entertain myself, I went to a Cajun dance I saw advertised in the Houston paper. Again, it was the same kind of people doing the same kind of dancing. I made friends with the leader of the musical group and he invited me and my girlfriend over to his house for chicken gumbo. He cooked a delicious chicken gumbo. I was very moved by his deep affection for his food as well as his music. I wanted to experience more of that. So later, when I saw Dewey Balfa in Chicago, I introduced myself, he invited me backstage and he shared some of his moonshine with me, and he said, “Come on down to Louisiana and I’ll help you make a film.” Down there, I met Marc Savoy and he was very helpful as well. Paul Tate and Revon Reed also were most helpful. Revon Reed let me live in his garage apartment in Mamou.

The way to identify French dancehalls in the early days was find a roadhouse off on a dirt road someplace that had all the side windows wide open during the daytime hours, as that was a sign it would be open for business later that night.  Near the door would be an area sectioned off for the men, along with buckets of cold beer, while sand would be liberally applied to the dance floor.  During the Depression, when farmers were doing backbreaking work in the fields, earning little more than $1.50 all day, Cajun musicians discovered that for a few hours work they could earn $2.50.  Inspired by Ann Allen Savoy’s book Cajun Music: a Reflection of a People, 1984, Blank is an unseen force behind the camera, where the power of the film are the musicians playing music onscreen while also offering reflections on their early experiences.  Dennis McGee remembers playing with Amédé Ardoin, who is to zydeco music what Robert Johnson is to the blues, and Buddy Bolden is to jazz, all three dying under mysterious circumstances, while Mark Savoy comes from a family in Eunice that designs chairs and furniture and holds a chemical engineering degree, but he became a legendary accordion maker while also playing the accordion in a Cajun family band that includes his singing and guitar-playing wife Ann, the author of the book.  Stepping on an accordion while hanging from a tree, Savoy displays the durability of the instrument that at least partially accounts for its long-lasting influence, as they never break, while offering a lesson on how exactly (in five levels) Cajun accordion is played. According to Savoy, it was performers like fiddler Dewey Balfa playing at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 that triggered the modern era Cajun revival. 

The film is loaded with Cajun and zydeco performers like Queen Ida, Canray Fontenot, D.L. Menard and Nathan Abshire, along with the irrepressible zydeco music of Clifton Chenier, who used to show up at Fitzgerald’s, a roadhouse bar and dancehall in Berwyn (just outside Chicago) every 4th of July week, whose recollection of songs was unparalleled, like the Duke Ellington of zydeco, as he’d play Little Richard in English right alongside those French Louisiana two-steps.  Queen Ida talks about the Cajun belt in southern Louisiana and Texas as if it is foreign territory cut off from the rest of the world, an unexplored part of America that was simply left alone and went largely undetected by outsiders for centuries, yet the rich diversity of their lives is filled with a healthy mix of French, Caribbean, Indian, and cowboy cultures, where they survived the Depression by understanding how to live off the land, where hunting is a mainstay of their survival as well as their diet, where Cajun food is all the rage today.  Blank takes his camera away from the Bourbon Street tourist attractions and shows us life in the small tucked-away towns that are little more than a main street, an old filling station with old stores and bars with peeling paint on the walls.  Never calling attention to itself, the film is a time capsule into another era, where what’s so heartfelt about all this music is how close to poverty the performers remain, as these are all people that never made a lot of money, that worked hard all their lives, many who survived the Depression by working in the oil refineries where nothing came easy.  All their songs are about loneliness, heartbreak or hard times, women that left them or were no good, drunken revelations, misbehaving, or death, a reaction to living rough lives, yet the sheer energy is so deliriously invigorating, covering the full dramatic spectrum in every song.  These are artists that love and appreciate what life has offered them, that sing with a spirit of joy, where their jubilant exhilaration offers some of the best of the human experience.