Far more than the average movie that actually has subtitles, Mamma Mia! feels to me like a foreign film, albeit one from no particular country. As directed by Briton Phyllida Lloyd, Mamma Mia! plays like it’s been awkwardly dubbed from another language; the cast is a mishmash of caucasian nationalities (American, English, Irish, Swedish); it’s set on a Greek island populated by colorful peasants who never speak; it’s got a score of Swedish pop songs in uncertain English which include references to locales like Glasgow and Paris, characters named “Fernando” and “Chiquitita,” as well as snatches of pidgin French (“Voulez Vous”) and Italian (“Mamma Mia!”). In its deracinated, decentered blandness it’s like a parody of people’s worst fears about globalization.
What holds this international festival of triviality together is nostalgia for the halcyon days of the… 1970s. Not the 60s, mind you (already travestied quite thoroughly in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe) but the 70s: when American and British counterculture spread across the globe and metastasized into something gaudy, vacuous and vaguely libertarian. Mamma Mia! has no other raison d’etre than celebration of this historical process and its experience by a small group of elites, which is what make its second half – when the party really gets started! – well nigh unbearable. The plot, which calls for a young girl to willingly convert her wedding into a bacchanalian reunion for her mother’s middle-aged friends, more or less expresses the Weltanschaaung; a bunch of drunken drag queens doing karaoke more or less expresses the style. It’s not just that the participants are “too old” for this (though there is that): it’s that they’re reaffirming something that was of pretty dubious value in the first place. And Pierce Brosnan should never sing again.
by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
22 Jul 2008 8:56 AM | Comments (1)
I was coerced into seeing Mamma Mia (the play), which ended up being great… as for the movie version, sounds fun, though it’s awkward to think of ol’ Pierce trying to sing, yeeesh
movie buff
14 August 2008
2:06 AM
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