The Rose

Annotation for KRRR! 2019

Bette Midler gives a stirring acting and singing performance in a musical biography inspired by the tragic fate of Janis Joplin. The film, which, together with several other monumental achievements, so to speak, ended the era of New Hollywood, marked a breakthrough both for the actress of the main role and for director Mark Rydell.

Musical melodramas about the unhappy lives of talented female artists have always been popular with Hollywood producers. In the fifties, for example, the films With a Song in My Heart (1952), Love me or leave me (1955) or The Helen Morgan Story (1957) were created. In the following decade, Barbra Streisand made her acting debut as Funny Girl (1968), and eight years later she dazzled in a more realistic alternative to the gradually disappearing classic musicals, in the third version, A Star Is Born (1976). A rawer look at the life of singing divas in the seventies was also offered by Billie Holiday's portrait Billie sings the blues (1972) with Diana Ross... and Rose, recapitulating one week in the life of rock vocalist Mary Rose Foster, struggling with self­‑destructive addictions to drugs, alcohol, men and fame.

The film, whose screenplay was co­‑written by Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Michael Cimino, the director of The Deer Hunter (1978) and the legendary western flop Heaven's Gate (1980), was conceived as a "star vehicle" for Midler from the beginning. The creators thus "prepaid" the audience's interest when they hired an already successful singer. After all, this was also the case with the aforementioned films with Streisand and Ross... or with last year's (already fourth) version of A Star Is Born, in which the singer Lady Gaga shines. In addition, Midler fans also played in the film, as most of the long concert sequences, which form the backbone of the narrative, were filmed live with a real audience. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond thus had to solve the challenge of how to make Midler's spontaneous performance stand out with the help of uninterrupted close­‑up shots and at the same time properly light the thousands of people around the stage due to the wholes shot from a helicopter. He enlisted the help of colleagues such as Conrad L. Hall, László Kovács or Haskell Wexler, with whom he had previously taken care of the visual appearance of the aesthetically and politically provocative works of New Hollywood.

Rose, set in 1969, is an apolitical film except for a few references to the war in Vietnam, but at the same time it is characterized by much greater energy and expressive invention than other, somewhat more settled melodramas. For this, he uses the deployment of actors in long, deeply composed shots. At the same time, he includes prominent lights, whose extinction in one of the final scenes has a crushing effect. In short, the film-makers spectacularly prevent their film, if only for a moment, from acting as a careful fulfilment of a well­‑known scheme in various ways. In fact, she has the same passion and ferocity as his protagonist, who lives and dies for music.

Martin Šrajer