This review of Bill Mousoulis’ recitative musical My Darling in Stirling (2023) will be positive. But it will only reach a positive position by weighing its negative aspects against its prime positive force: music. It is the tension between these two forces—the plasticity of cine visuals being overcome by the dimensional-warping sonics of accompanying music—that make the film a unique and even important contribution to the unending problematic of what to do with the Musical in cinema.
The very first image before the title card My Darling in Stirling is a wide shot of the entrance to the northern Adelaide township of Stirling. To the left, a signpost welcoming everyone to its central roadway lined with trees aflame in autumn colours. It’s meant to be an autumn leaf, but it looks like a gaudy surfboard, painted acidic orange, bordered with a lime green macho-welded bar outline. A wine glass, cappuccino cup and some scattered leaves are gathered at its base, represented in harsh logoistic shapes. Above, white softened typewriter font says “Stirling – est. c 1854”. It looks like it has been designed by a 12 year old using clip art from a computer running Windows 97—which means it looks like something designed in 1987, convinced it is stylistically referencing 1957 graphics. When Mike Judge commenced pre-production on the TV series Beavis and Butt-head in 1992, MTV Animation provided a series of design sketches for the key places the titular characters would hang out. To Judge’s dismay and disgust, they reminded him of how then-current LA designers seemed locked in a mind set to render a local burger joint or coffee shop as if it was from some 1950s Hollywood movie—or more accurately, the ‘retro’ coffee shop in Beverly Hills 90210 (1990) looked like it came from Happy Days (1975). The clip art surfboard is part of this continuing bizarre ahistorical legacy.
Atop My Darling in Stirling’s postcard of an Escher-like pool of graphic allusions, the opening chords of background music is played on a digital keyboard. The simulated string textures—technically, no more than buzzing, tinny waveforms with an excess of high frequency filtered rasping and harmonic artefact noise—play a perambulatory chordal sequence. It sounds like the noodling of a organist at a suburban church gathering as the congregation files in for mass. The music is unobtrusive, purposeless, meaningless. A montage of shots unfolds as the chords meander in an existential fog, capturing the environs of Stirling in—I say without judgement—all its banality. The shots capture a parade of logos for businesses, boutiques and services, all devoid of style, personality, schism or presence. No, this isn’t an anonymous strip mall or a megaplex of corporate franchised outlets: this is small business, local craftspeople, community spirits and the like coming together in an oasis of purchasing, sharing and exchanging. It’s meant to somehow be ‘better’ than the former. Every city small and large in Australia and other Anglophonic nations has an area like this: politely alternative, proudly middle, semi-retiring, deservedly relaxed, commercially secure, comfortably numbing.
A point of clarity: I’m talking about the audiovisual confection of this opening scene—a plastic aesthetic which will govern the movie as wholly as the flat and insipid design of the township of Stirling defines its ambience. I have no interest in either the sociological, anthropological or political assessments of actual people who chose to live in such zones—as well as those who critique them, celebrate them, abhor them or rally for them. No side is being taken here. I’m talking about a movie: about cine-visuals, about documentary capture of extant design, and the inter-plasticity of locations snared as backdrops for a staged narrative. On one hand, the visuality of My Darling in Stirling exploits an impressive consistency in its look, courtesy of the claustrophobic homogeneity that such utopian pockets embrace through near repressive council regulations of public space and private occupancy. Viewed this way, the many ‘real people’ caught in the film’s backgrounds, strolling down streets and entering shops, are either trapped citizens in a dystopian alternative reality, or cosplay holdouts willingly succumbing to the performative role they play in being the Letraset figures to the zone’s logistic terrain.
Most of what I just said reeks of nihilistic dismissal. But it is presented here therapeutically: to remind one of the kind of distaste many felt (and still do) when caught in the musicalized world of a movie like Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). My Darling in Stirling’s director Bill Mousoulis is upfront about that film’s influence and inspiration here. Many of my friends and colleagues in France don’t mince words when it comes to damning Demy’s cine-world view in the film, accusing its mannered performances and overwhelming decoration of refuting social reality and political statement. (Hating musicals as they do certainly doesn’t guarantee an objective critical stance here.) I think Demy’s movies are perfect, because they ridiculously adhere to a fairy-tale notion that perfection exists, while their production and narration wholly thwarts such desires. (For example, Donkey Skin, 1973, is a near-pornographic collapse of costume and set-design that is a million times more grubby and abused than countless movies of the time trading in clichés of ‘gritty realism’.) And while Umbrellas is the nadir of Demy’s control of the inter-plasticity resulting from overlaying design upon reality (via vibrant wallpaper, coloured lighting, co-ordinated costumery and object placement) it is also the film that most powerfully constructs that world through completely silencing it. If the history of Musicals is one of such actioning of silence (via playback, lip-synching, camera timing and body placement) then Umbrellas intensifies that strategy: it denaturalizes direct/location sound and transforms its extinguished aura into phonetic utterance, oralised melodic lines, and the psychosonic ringing of music in characters’ heads.
But My Darling in Stirling does not feature music by Michel Legrand, the composer for Umbrellas and other Demy musicals. In place, director Bill Mousoulis takes on the role of ‘director’ of the score. As he detailed in a short talk after a screening in Melbourne at ACMI, he wrote the script, including passages of recitative dialogue to be sung. He then selected various instrumental cues and songs from a copyright-free site for the scripted passages, and fit his words as lyrics to melodies matched to the cues and songs. Those songs (now with words) were then sung to by hired singers, and the final mixes of those recordings were then played back on set for contracted actors (most of who were not the singers of their songs in the film) to lip-synch for the camera. To a degree, this replicates the procedure of filmed musicals, and Umbrellas specifically, where the lips of Catherine Deneuve sound the song of Danielle Licari. The crucial and exciting difference is Bill’s neutralization of the commissioned composer through his act of ‘directing’ the music. The uniqueness of Umbrellas is partially nurtured by France being one of the key territories in the post-WWII rebuild of the European film industries that embraced post-dubbing for its imported entertainment content. As with Italy and Germany, France continues this preferential practice today for much of its imported films and TV shows, running counter to the international film festival circuit’s priority to present subtitled foreign content to its audience.
We now return to precisely what this procedure enables in the film’s audiovision. Bill selected a range of musical tracks and cues, most with a leaning toward contemporary Off-Broadway (think Jonathan Larson’s Rent, 1996) as played by sole-musicians multi-tracking ProTools with guitars, drum machines and MIDI keyboards. These type of produced songs swamp the plethora of ‘free music’ on-line repositories. The available music—regardless of genre—is, as mentioned earlier, “unobtrusive, purposeless, meaningless”. Too many reasons account for this, none of which individually can be held responsible for qualifying the meld of anonymous and anodyne outcomes to anyone with a sophisticated musical ear. Hacks innocently make the stuff. Hustlers cynically push it. Sites encourage lowest-common denominator uptake. Uploaders go for broadest appeal. Wannabes download the content. This type of musical service is identical to clip art: both are designed not simply for people who do not have the manual, technical or artistic skill to compose melodies or draw images: both are designed for people who think bad stuff looks and sounds good.
I’m trying to be as elitist as possible here, because no good comes from the democratization of creativity. (That’s an inoffensive position despite the outrage it triggers in smarmy creatives and artless dupes alike.) I say this because ultimately I don’t care how further this ceaseless drive for artful affectation overtakes all modes of individual enterprise that deep down know that one is not art, and even deeper down would admit that it doesn’t really care about art that much at all. Focussing on the rarefied sliver of ‘film music’ within this global miasma of industrialised creation of an art form at the service of artistic entertainment, there are zillions of films—and zillions more to come—which trade in the most vapid, shallow and reductivist notions of how music contributes to a cinematic narrative. None of them use downloadable license-free cues. They use professional ‘film composers’, some of whom are famous for their dross and admired for their grand contribution to the art of cinema. Gig economy composers paying their rent through accessible online repositories delivering banal content is no different from ridiculously over-paid composers delivering what their production lords demand. Mainstream or Indie, Marvel of Iranian, it don’t matter. And nor do the ethics of composers from both realms: they each are likely capable of doing entirely different things of greater quality, impact and distinction, but have strategically chosen to pay lip service to their relative market in order to retain employment and obtain compensation. There is nothing romantic in any of this. This is the stark reality of what it is to make art of any sort in a social context.
Through Bill Mousoulis’ embrace of this socio-economic determinant—the type of which governs so much in the production of independent cinema—My Darling in Stirling shifts slightly from the nominal signifiers of budget restraints and docu-style naturalism which have typified Bill’s practice and aesthetic for over 40 years. By embedding his sensibilities within the world of audiovisual clip art—either intentionally or inevitably—he has produced a film that is bizarrely closer to the Cronenbergian likes of Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium (2019): a hermetically ingrown dimension where life is propagated through the intersection of pods, people, polyps and places, all networked to perform as if their world is essential, normal and inevitable. That might sound like an outlandish comparison—but that is precisely what music can do in a film. For it is the world rendered musical that most effectively constructs an impossible imaginary, a Brigadoon of eventfulness that is energized by mysterious incantations and melodic vocalizations.
Watching My Darling in Stirling was like observing the township of Stirling performing itself in the film amidst the council’s staged real estate. The activities of locals non-actors and imported actors concentrate a collision between the two in the shared zone, as if Pasolini is guest-directing Glee. This theatrical effect allows the unfolding story to become weirdly engrossing and surprisingly effective. In numerous moments, genuine pathos is manifest and empathy is hard to deny, as plain people with simple drives and predictable desires trace their arcs and follow their routes of interaction. It’s all First Love 101, but the reigned-in melody lines and inexpressive vocal tones prevent the delivery becoming maudlin. Indeed, anguish is absent and healing is accepted: this isn’t Björk wailing like a siren of the oppressed in Lars von Trier’s turgid cabaret Dancer in the Dark (2000)—the most infamous ‘intervention’ of Demy’s Umbrellas. Bill has chosen to side with the yearning of his characters, and has furnished them with a world that is at once hopelessly unrealistic and hopefully respectful. He has achieved this with the most unlikely of means, but with the most consistent of applications. Simply, he has made a Musical.