Ray Pride

A feel-good movie about old people singing? Oh no no no, my my, no.

That's the common reaction the terrific "Young@Heart" gets before people have seen it, from the people I was raving about it to, and starting with my own fears of sentimentality and saccharine, that it would be an eye-rolling kind of "Mad Hot Sickroom." I was wrong, and it would be wrong to miss this with an audience. Funny, blunt and often moving, it's the story of the Young@Heart Chorus, a Northampton, Massachusetts senior citizens' choir where the minimum age is 73. While their repertoire in the twenty-five years since they began isn't all rock, Sally George and Stephen Walker's documentary focuses on rehearsals for a big show with their music director Bob Cilman and the songs like Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia," James Brown's "I Feel Good" and Coldplay's "Fix You" (the rendition of which I can't get out of my head weeks later). The film opens with 92-year-old Eileen, a tiny scruff of an Englishwoman belting out the Clash's "Should I Stay Or Should I Go?" From there you're hooked, with joy, wisdom of ages and unexpected drama along the way (unless mortality is something you don't expect). The most difficult song for the group is Allen Toussaint's "Yes We Can Can," which contains the phrase "Yes we can can" more times than most people of any age could remember; its staccato throughout the film is a nice bit of zeitgeist kismet, paralleled by the Barack Obama "Yes I Can" song and video. It's emblematic of how any pop song, written from a perspective of youth, has other implications from the perspective of age: "Oh yes we can, I know we can, Yes we can can, Why can't we, if we wanna get yes we can can, I know we can make it world."

Shot in a decidedly lo-fi fashion, "Young@Heart" has some of the most unassumingly artful editing you could imagine: structuring the seven weeks spent with this crew in such a clean, unobtrusive fashion is a genuine feat. Walker, who gets some of his best results from asking his very grown-up figures blunt questions of the "Holy shit, did he ask that?" variety, has other tricks up his sleeve, including a recurrent knack for framing his subjects from a higher than normal perspective.

"I grew up in a tradition, actually. There was a BBC series… It's a very interesting question, actually. No one has asked me that question before," Walker tells me in his stop-and-start, overlapping, very English way of speaking. "It's always fun to start talking about things like that. I grew up as a filmmaker both documentary and drama in the BBC. I worked there for about ten years, which I left in 1997. I was really lucky to be part of a series as a director, became sort of a cult series, it was a series called ‘Modern Times in the 1990s.’ It was the last time the BBC had a proper documentary series slot. It doesn't exist any longer. It died about 2000, 2001. What was incredible about that series is that we were encouraged to be stylistically as interesting as we could. It changed the landscape of documentary filmmaking in Britain, so much so that a lot of documentaries that I see made, for example, in America, seem to be so conventional. We were trying to find different ways of portraying people, thinking about people."

Which was the genesis of this perspective. Why does it work? "One of the interesting things about being above somebody, looking down, is actually it's a fantastic way of looking at the landscape in which they exist. If you film somebody straight on, you get that terrible kind of shot, if I was just doing an interview with you right now, it would be a terrible shot, a bit of wall, the sofa cutting your face in half. It's ugly. It's difficult, isn't it? I've often found that in certain circumstances when I want to get a sense of a person, y'know, a subliminal kind, if that's the word, that you don't want to use too much. But you do need it. But if you shoot just slightly above the head angle looking down on a wide-angle lens and you place them center screen, then what you actually get is a real portrait, in a sense like a photographic portrait, you get a sense of the person within a space, and that space tells you something. You get a sense of the world in which they live. The other thing I've done quite a lot of in recent films, and I really did it on this film, is because I felt that the way to bring these characters to life for the audience was to keep a conversation going between us, y'know, to put myself in it. When you joke with them and you laugh with them and you rib them a bit and you're a bit irreverent… What I don't want are those voice-of-god-type documentaries where people are answering questions [to someone off-screen]. I added to that by getting people to talk straight to me, straight to the lens, which is a slightly disturbing thing. I wanted that."

"Young@Heart" opens Friday.

(2008-04-15)

Also by Ray Pride

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Helmeted cyclists stream along Milwaukee Avenue below Division Friday night in a soft blue dusk with the smell of spring, almost. I can't find the screening space opening in the next hour or so. The subway whooshes under the grated sidewalk. The loiterers outside Crater Liquors aren't likely to know. Even with directions from a smiling passerby— "The screening's that way!"—I walk past the Nightingale twice: a ground-floor space with sliding patio doors covered with sheets of black paper and an eight-by-ten page announcing the screening
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(2008-04-01)

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Thirty million surveillance cameras. Four billion hours of video a week. Two hundred sightings of you, me and everyone we know each and every day. These are the sturdy statistics that open Adam Rifkin's low-budget "Look," burdened with a mini-Post-It of a title that sounds like a studio remaking a minor J-horror entry starring Luke Wilson
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