Golden Eighties

GOLDEN EIGHTIES   ***

Chantal Akerman

1986

IDEA:  The residents of a shopping mall bounce between various romantic entanglements, misunderstandings, and misfortunes.

BLURB:  Golden Eighties - a jubilant, candy-colored Jacques Demy-esque musical - would seem something of an anomaly within the oeuvre of a director as famously austere as Chantal Akerman. And it is, in most ways. But it’s also, as the opening shot announces, far from a conventional song-and-dance picture. Against the marbled title of a shopping center, women’s flats and heels trot in perfect diagonals across the screen. The movements are too choreographed to be natural, a sense of artifice reinforced by an aggressively peppy score. What’s more, it’s only the legs of women we see, disembodied as in advertising. If it wasn’t already, it will soon become evident that this is not a fluffy fantasy but a tart parody of the codes and aesthetics of a kind of vacuous, late 20th-century commercial comedy, as well as the sexist consumer culture that underlies it. Even as she indulges in genre pleasures - the musical numbers are delightfully odd admixtures of Demy, Grease, and West Side Story - Akerman consistently defamiliarizes the mall and its social dynamics, whether sending random, gratuitous hordes of people to split up conversing characters or, oppositely, emptying spaces of their typical capitalist excesses. In this milieu, the multiple tangles of (conspicuously heterosexual) romantic dalliances seem as puddle-deep and misbegotten as they are, lovers reduced to commodities to be swapped and discarded. This cynicism that courses beneath the cheery facade makes Golden Eighties a sharply, if not exactly profound, ironic exercise, only undercut, in the film’s genuinely emotional crescendo, by Delphine Seyrig’s Holocaust survivor assuring a jilted girl that life goes on beyond the mall.