Cinema
Desperado (18, selected cinemas)
Gloopy purée
Mark Steyn
If you want to know why pop culture is doomed, go see Desperado. It brings together the three hippest, hottest, hap- pening names in motion pictures Robert Rodriguez, Antonio Banderas, Quentin Tarantino — for a movie that's hip, hot, happening — and hollow. Rodriguez, whose El Mariachi was a cult hit, is the film's producer/director/writer; Banderas plays a ne'er-do-well; and Tarantino plays a nerd-do-well.
The plot and place are familiar from a zillion other films, not least El Mariachi, but Steve Martin's Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid skewers the genre in one deft exchange: a sleazebag in the bar sidles up to Martin and says, 'Hey, meester. I geeve you five thousand dollars to leave thees steenking town'; and Martin replies, 'Sorry. To leave stinking towns, I charge ten thou- sand dollars and a smack on the lips from Carmen Miranda.'
Here, we're in a steenking town south of the border, into whose steenking bar wan- ders a pony-tailed stranger in a dark suit. The bar falls silent, save for the jingling of Banderas' spurs. `Choo keel drogg dillers,' gasps the girl. Before he got into keeling drogg dillers, he made music on his geetar. `Bott they keel thee wooman I love,' he explains, and, in so doing, taught him an important lesson: 'Ees easier to destroy than to create.'
Ees also easier to be knowingly post- modern than to create. This film hasn't a single genuine human impulse in it. Instead, it invites you to share in its own cleverness — which, for some moviegoers, is apparently more than adequate compen- sation for the lack of drama, emotion, char- acter. Tarantino, in his drug-courier cameo, gives his second rotten perfor- mance within a month (after Four Rooms) and it doesn't matter, because the obvious inadequacy of it is supposed to be part of the fun. Yet, for all its superficial hipness, it's the same approach as Liberace: 'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik' or 'The St Louis Blues', he reduced .'em to to the same gloopy purée. So it is with Rodriguez and Tarantino: the cult studs of the cultural studies courses recycle every instantly recognisable pop reference, edit them like a rock video and pass it off as state-of-the- art. It's the state of the art, and the end of the art.
Back in the pre-ironic era, there were movie stars who could do things you couldn't. Gene Kelly was one of them, a Hollywood dancer at a time when it was possible to be such a thing. Most of last week's obituaries took a common tack: 'vig- orous athleticism,' said the New York Times, 'earthy masculinity'. In other words, not a prancing nancy. We think of him as the navy swab with T-shirt and rippling forearms in On the Town and Anchors Aweigh. But he never found a way of trans- lating that 'earthy masculinity' into a plau- sible dance duet style. With Astaire, dance is courtship, an expression of romance at its most idealised and aspirational. Kelly's first big role was on Broadway in Pal Joey, as the heel cynically servicing the older woman, and, ever after, there seemed something insincere in his relations with his leading ladies. The duets are embarrassing: the over-ardent balletic solemnity with Leslie Caron in An American in Paris, zig- zagging across the heather to Cyd Charisse in Brigadoon. But put him with anyone other than a chick and he was unbeatable: with Donald O'Connor and a bewildered elocution teacher (Singin' in the Rain), with a bunch of kids (An American in Paris), with a couple of guys bashing trash-can lids (It's Always Fair Weather), with his brother Fred as a vaudevillian double-act (Deep in My Heart), with Jerry the Mouse (Anchors Aweigh), with Astaire (That's Entertainment Part 11, when their combined age was 141), and with himself in the alter-ego number in Cover Girl.
Astaire was content to describe himself as a song'n'dance man. For Kelly, that wasn't enough: he was obsessed with the possibilities of dance as Art, and bogged himself down in pretentious, plotless piffle like Invitation to the Dance. How strange that, for all his ambitions for the form, his best work is not about dance as drama or dance as character but the sheer, irre- sistible exuberance of dance as dance. Watch him in It's Always Fair Weather, blithely skimming the streets on roller- skates, clattering up and down the kerb, gliding round the fire hydrants: most of us would gladly rest our reputations on that number alone. They're three of the most joyous minutes in motion pictures, and a literal reminder of what popular culture is supposed to do: find beauty in the streets.
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