Magique!

Just saw this movie last night. To get straight to the point, if you have always wanted to sit back and listen to poetry sung/spoken with all the deep subtleties of the soothing French language, then you have found your movie. Without a doubt, the focus is on the rhyme, meter, and prose. What a pity this musical focuses so little on the drama and storyline. I love a simple story well told. I love music. Words carefully chosen can send trembles down my spine. What I do not like are constant interruptions. And that is what you get in this movie. The drama interrupts the music and the music interrupts the drama. There are simply far too many songs (about 1 every 5 minutes) that prevent us from sucking any depth out of the story. And with a story so simple as this movie's is, you need some time to dig deep. You are allowed none of that. And what a shame because everything feels flat. Even the poetry of the songs, while sounding deep, end up ultimately talking about nothing. The movie seems to feel that tiny random events of beauty in and of themselves, make life meaningful. They don't. Tiny random events of beauty make life exhilarating because there is a higher meta-narrative which transcends them and ties them together.

"Magique" also suffers from few memorable melodies and average singing. But the director did not intend to produce full blown songs. but rather more diary entries into the character's heads. Still not very interesting from a dramaturgical point of view. Nothing moved me.