Richard Linklater is back at Berlinal 11 years after he won the Silver Bear Prize for his Oscar-winning “Boyhood”, this time with “Blue moon“A boring chamber piece on the opening evening for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s” Oklahoma! “1943. But the period comedy, which premieres tonight at the festival, adopts the perspective of Lorenz Hart, the great American lyricist who was half of Rodgers and Hart before a creature fragmentation.
The film Takes place in or around the same bar at Sardis, where Rodgers (Andrew Scott) greet his scary public after the musical Broadway premiere while trying to keep away from his former creative partner, whose boozing and uncertainty (and often wild transfers) make people uncomfortable. Ethan Hawke undergoes a unique physical transformation to give a theatrical but never overplayed performance as a five -foot high, sexually ambiguous alcoholic sat in the carriage. The actor, opposite Scott and Margaret Qualley as his light-sprouted protégé, likes Robert Kaplow’s bouncily witty and long-filled script, where Hart regrets how “life has become overrun.” Qualley gets a big, juicy monologue about a busted sexual meeting with another guy with whom she is in unanswered love, even when Hart seems to fall for her too, or at least irrationally love her.
Several journalists at the film’s press conference show on Tuesday out of Berlin Famous “Blue Moon” as a “masterpiece.” It’s easy to see why Todd Haynes’ jury can end up considering “Blue Moon” for a script or even an actor for Ethan HawkeWhose collaborations with Linklater span more than three decades and include “before” the films as well as “Boyhood” and many more. Sony Pictures Classics brought “Blue Moon” to Berlin with North American distribution in place; Expect an awards ceremony here, after a planned late spring edition.
“When I was 16 or 17 and tried to find out who I was, I turned a lot to Richard Linklater And Ethan Hawke movies as part of figuring it out. For me, it was very surreal to have the opportunity to work with them after growing up on their films and their collaboration. To prepare me for this, I just did what they said to me, “Qualey said.
When Hart rails against the standardization of taste and audience become desensitized to art that ranks the psyche in this movie, Rodgers accused of going for mainstream or emotionally broad for something like “Oklahoma!” up more than once in the press room.
“One of the dangers of offensive art, whether we want to talk about good punk music or any early Brecht plays that are punk in their sensitivity. Some of the great offensive art is that the audience must care. They don’t sell. You, society, must do it important, ”Hawke said. “In order for offensive art to have a place in our conversation, it must care about, and when we prioritize money at all costs, we get generic material that appeals to the most amounts of people, and we are told that it is best. It’s a dance we all do together. If you love offensive art and you want it, then you require it, you will get it. It will be done. Right now, people don’t think they will make money from it so it will not be done. “
Linklater, whose last movie “Hit Man” streamed on Netflix but which has largely avoided making traditional studio films in his 40-year career, said: “Movies have always been escapism, and our movie, he accuses” Oklahoma! “Being an escapist in the middle of the terror from World War II. Most human psychors want to escape a bit. There is probably less offensive art than it has been before.”
The filmmaker added: “I don’t think I’ve compromised at all. It is a low budget movie. There is no pressure. I don’t have complaints about compromise. You hope everyone likes the movie but there were no test shows. You hear the horror stories, and the film industry can be a collision between art and trade, but I have largely been spared during these years. “
Hawke said it might be because Linklater has never made a commercial movie. Linklater said the goal of “Blue Moon” was to do it as a Rodgers and Hart -song, it is “beautiful and kind of sad and fun.”
“You are preparing for some like this by playing Macbeth,” Hawke said. “What Robert Kaplow wrote for us, this quite beautiful script, that if it is right is basically a movie that is a scene. It begins, and all dominoes fall into a gesture, and if it can have that simplicity, but to make verbiage live, to do the dynamics, the musical quality is talking about, when is it fast, when it is slow when arresting That, when is it heartbreaking? How can it continue to change? I can say that I prepared myself by shaving my head or preparing Lorenz Hart songs. That’s not really true. It is long to find out how to scenes and how to make a seven or 11-page stage dynamics enough that you can look at it. ”
Sony Pictures Classics releases “Blue Moon” 2025.
