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Review by sydney ★★★★★ Liked

wow men really invented capitalism just so they could get horny at the mall

5

chantal akerman's IN THIS ECONOMY? the musical.

also, troll move to cast a pop star (lio) in a musical and not give her any singing parts.

6

this would make a perfect double feature with david byrne's TRUE STORIES - both films look at the shopping mall through a lens of awe and wonder, but still remain critical of the economic apparatus that led to the mall's replacement of other, less insidious venues for communal commerce. for consumers, the shopping mall is a refuge from the rain; for the people who work there, it can be a suffocating prison. but a delightful social microcosm still manages to operate within its confines. the mall itself (or at least the type of mall that exists in this film) seems to already be a species under threat of extinction; the locally-owned business that inhabit it are constantly under threat from…

6

Chantal Ackerman made a shopping mall musical in the mid 80s where everyone is pretty sad and nobody gets what they want. So, you know, what you'd expect from a Chantal Ackerman romantic musical set in a shopping mall.

Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½

Romance and capitalism intersect in messy ways, a series of love triangles and parallelograms all actively informed by the consumerist milieu that forces everyone together. The slight perversion of family businesses within a mall, the shared space making a mockery of a young rake's parents and bosses trying to advise him emotionally as he bounces between shops after his lovers. Yes, some of the lyrics trip over themselves; as with One Sings, The Other Doesn't or Johnnie To's Office (either of which would make for a killer double feature), the songwriting aggressively favors theme over mood or even something as basic as meter. But Akerman leans into the goofiness of a mall musical, turning preening girls and geeky guys into…

Review by Dante ★★★★½

she said ye can we get married at the mall

2

aucun amour n’est jamais pour rien aucun amour n’est jamais perdu, il touche ton cœur et ton cœur en touche d’autres, tous les amours tous les rêves tous les désirs existent toujours quelque part 
(à lire avec la voix enchanteresse de delphine seyrig)

Review by Willow Maclay ★★★★

Like Akerman's style through a Cyndi Lauper lens. The 80s permeates through every frame to the point where this is just soaked in the images of tacky mall architecture. Shot on one sound stage giving it an almost theatre esque feeling this finds Akerman's trademark minimalism in a completely different mode through musical and stage. The idea of a musical sometimes overwhelms her, and she loses control of the picture, but I find it invigorating that she challenged herself in something so foreign to her previous work in the seventies. This is minor Akerman, and so clearly dated to the time period, but then it's called Golden Eighties in the first place so it was always going to be a…

1

Love Conquers Mall

Review by nrh ★★★★½ Liked

a close-up of high-heeled shoes criss-crossing a hideous marble floor announces a sensibility of brittle, even harsh flatness, not only in the design (an underground, artificial mall of two store-fronts and the space between them) and aesthetic (shallow spaces, garish colors and simple patterns) but of history and emotions.

time seems to collapse here - the fashions of the 80s, movie posters of the 50s and 60s, the memories of the camps, letters from home, at least 3 generations with akerman's own a kind of orphan - and the only real moments of lyricism come when the lights in the shops go out, and some of the eerie music of toute une nuit manages to seep in through the edges.

perhaps it's the unavoidable consequence of going to an akerman screening in 2016, but no film this abrasive and busy should be this lovely, or this mournful.

1

The choreography on this stood out most in how awkward it was. Not sure if that was intentional, but it actually acquires a kind of charm after the first sequence. It feels as though Akerman is at war with the genre and her own sensibilities, but it's not bad. It's intriguing, merging pop-showtune romance with Eighties glam and the mall-capitalist aesthetic, creating a small world out of a handful of store fronts. It's absurd, completely bananas.

Review by mary ★★★★½ Liked

french musicals will always be special