Steven Spielberg directed one of the main and probably the most beautiful film of 2021.
Steven Spielberg has filmed everything from the landing of soldiers on Omaha Beach to meeting dinosaurs and extraterrestrial civilizations (and more than once), but the director has never entered the territory of any musicals or remakes before. And if the heritage of cinematography, even if it was not literally rewritten by him, but somehow grew in his films, then music and dance until that moment did not become the central expressive means of his cinematic language. One can only envy the author's courage of the director, who in his eighties is not afraid not only to try new things and tread on untested soil, genre or thematic, but also to present us with a landscape of great romantic love.
The scale of the West Side Story legacy is truly great and without reminders: the assimilation of Romeo and Juliet in the slums of New York, where all windows from the first floor to the last are tightly wrapped in garlands of clotheslines; the story has many faces, but it always sounds recognizable. Music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and script by Arthur Laurents, first under the command of choreographer Jerome Robbins, conquered Broadway and then moved to film (with the help of Robert Wise) to disarm the film academics and take away nine figurines. 60 years later, the first step of the end of the 50s is still the same - a guy meets a girl. She is Puerto Rican Maria (Rachel Zegler), he is American Tony, and actually Pole Anton (Ansel Elgort). But according to the laws of the streets, the rules are established by those whose ancestors had come to this land earlier, that is, the Jets (not only "psheks", but also the Irish, Jews and other descendants of the emigrants who built the States), and the dark-skinned Sharks will have to make room for themselves in the nooks of the "paradise on earth ". The West Side was demolished by bulldozer cannonballs in five minutes - very soon the ghetto will turn into Lincoln Center.
What in this pompous world of fluffy skirts, dusty sneakers and knuckles knocked down in blood so attracted Spielberg? The final title traces the dedication to the Pope with quiet tenderness. West Side Story is the director's first film after the death of his father Arnold Spielberg in 2020: in this one can see not only a gesture of filial affection, but also an ideological continuation of the family tree. The director's grandparents arrived in America at the dawn of the 20th century, and despite the fact that Stephen was born the son of US citizens, his surname belonged to Orthodox Jews: traditions all the time reminded the director that outsiders had no place here. An echo of the plot is heard: the confrontation in "History" was originally conceived as an act of religious intolerance - Montagues and Capulets in the pop genre were to become Jews and Catholics. This is probably why Spielberg, who today can be considered a patriotic director more than anyone else, nevertheless left a place in his filmography for the reflection of the consciousness of a “stranger”. Before the American Dream can come true, it must be appropriated by right.
Discussions about the director's relationship with the classics, on the one hand, lead away from the very subject of the conversation, that is, the film (well, when will compliments to the dresses and vocals begin in this text?), And on the other hand, this is the necessary context for justifying the fact of the film's release. Spielberg himself says that he was 10 years old when he first heard the chords Tonight, tonight on the disc, and since then the music has not left his head, but childhood love alone is not enough in this case. Yes, the director, in principle, thinks of filmmaking as psychotherapy sessions, over and over again pronouncing fears, complexes and secrets on the big screen. But, despite all this, the author's desire to "retell" the classics from the outside may look as if someone in the middle of the XXI century had conceived to re-shoot "Titanic" (however, this is likely to happen). From the great pillars of Hollywood you least expect remakes, and even with the shameless attributes of "relaunches": in Spielberg's film, the owner of the pharmacy was played by Rita Morena, who played the role of Anita in the 1961 film, which brought the actress the only Oscar (but, most likely, at least the nomination will be repeated).
But this is the main magic of Steven Spielberg's direction: things that may seem banal, primitive and ordinary, say them from the screen by anyone else, in his mouth / eyes / hands become sacred revelations and not truisms, but an immutable truth. Love is the only thing that can save us all, but it doesn't always work out well. A war over color differences is going nowhere. Patriarchal foundations like the principle "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" are not just destructive, but deadly, and revenge does not bring deliverance to the revengeful. For a century, cinema (and eternity - theater, literature and other types of art) has been repeating this. But the magic (or skill?) Of Spielberg is precisely how he manages to speak through the prism of eternal innocence.
It is the question of language and the search for communication that has always been the central motive in the author's canvases. In "Close Encounters of the Third Degree," music became the means of communication with guests from space, in "Alien" - that very outstretched ET finger, touching the rough skin of a Triceratops replaced the words in "Jurassic Park", and the linguistic barrier in "West Side Story" was not remains only a measure of cinematic convention. Replicas in Spanish are left without dubbing, so that the gap becomes tangible and the abyss is felt even by those who remain on the other side of the screen. When words are powerless, sounds come in - first it is a whistle, then clicks, and then, when the cacophony of the streets and the ardor of young people gain strength, there is already music and dance. In a conventional genre, which is often called overly theatrical, Spielberg interprets the attributes of a musical as the absence of other means of understanding. If his heroes are able to negotiate with the aliens, is there really no common language for people living in the same block? And this makes West Side Story 2021 more like Pocahontas than the 1961 film (which, in general, was not a reference point - the author took the performance as the source of inspiration). But bringing to the fore the romantic feelings, which before for Spielberg were only an integral part of family love, he is still, like a child, ashamed of the door of the parent's bedroom. Dance remains a sublime body language, but not an act of corporeality that can replace any speech.
The sensual quest for communication and the emotional landscape of the painting also influence the architecture of the frame. Spielberg's space is no less lively than the enthusiastic smile on the faces of the beloved (the director's devoted associate, cameraman Janusz Kaminski again stood behind the camera): it narrows, expands, moves, turns upside down and from time to time makes not only the hearts of the audience stop, but also hands - clap. At some point, the perfection of the frame even risks to seem tiresome: will the author not make a single misfire until the very end? And no dancer ever stumbles? But the search for a flaw in an infallible picture is provoked by an inner pessimist who whispers that the ideal does not exist. Let it be so, but the director managed to get as close to him as possible. Against the backdrop of the endless haze of the pandemic, which practically demolished the box office like a slum, Spielberg shoots a great humanistic movie - large-scale, impeccably beautiful and, despite the tragedy, optimistic: if in 60 years the story of lovers from the West Side has not lost its relevance, then even after 60 will definitely be just a fancy vignette from the past.
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