Glorious as foot-stomping nostalgia
I remember “Scaramouche” from the mid-1950s, when I was just entering puberty, for two related items. There was the epic sword fight between the characters played by Stewart Granger and Mel Ferrer in the 1952 film based on Rafael Sabatini’s 1921 novel, which began with the memorable line: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
That first line was so classic that it also started the film as Gothic text from the first page of the book. The climactic duel lasted some seven minutes, the longest ever swashbuckling swordplay ever seen onscreen, with the protagonists gliding and hopping from a theater’s balcony seats to the stage, backstage, and back on stage again.
Being the hero, Granger as the romantic adventurer turned revolutionary finally vindicates himself against a royal villain who had humiliated him as the better swordsman on two earlier occasions. At some point, he had to conceal his identity, and so joins a traveling theater troupe as an actor. He plays Scaramouche, a roguish buffoon character in the commedia dell’arte. Hence the title.
“Fandango” is of mid-18th-century Spanish origin, meaning a fast dance by a couple, usually with castanets. In 1967, the Grammy Award-winning rock band Procol Harum started its anthem-suite A Whiter Shade of Pale with the lines: “We skipped the light fandango / Turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor / I was feeling kinda seasick — but the crowd called out for more…”
Of course, Galileo Galilei was the Italian astronomer who became known as the “father of modern science.” Supporting the Copernican theory of a sun-centered solar system, he was accused of heresy by the Church for his beliefs.
We are familiar with the central character in the 1784 play “The Marriage of Figaro” by playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. The word “figaro” has acquired the meaning of “barber” (of Seville) in modern French, reflecting the character’s profession. These days it’s more associated with coffee. “Bismillah” means “in the name of Allah” — an invocation used by Muslims at the beginning of any undertaking — from the Arabic “bi-smi-ll?h(i),” the first words of the Koran.
For its part, “Beelzebub” is one of the many names given to The Devil. The name used to be associated with the Canaanite god Baal, but was later adopted by some Abrahamic religions as a major demon.
Okay, so we have Scaramouche, fandango, Galileo, Figaro, Bismillah, and Beelzebub. So like all vehicle passengers drawn together by car-aoke, we’re ready to sing Bohemian Rhapsody.
Why, a recent trending video featured a three-or-four-year-old child singing it from his high chair, and getting all the abstruse references (and notes) right. So would most millennials born well after the Live Aid concert in Wembley when Queen reappeared to reclaim its place on the rock pantheon for all time.
Well, this is just my way of saying that despite all the tepid or negative reviews thus far, I couldn’t help but enjoy the film Bohemian Rhapsody — especially since it was premiered in IMAX at SM Megamall.
Sure, it’s a middle-of-the-road, cut-and-paste, paint-by-numbers biopic, done so safely, far from the cutting-edge quality of Freddie Mercury’s overwhelming life and music aura. But Rami Malek’s performance alone lifts the film from tedium. He may appear so physically slight compared to our icon in the flesh, but the passion of his thespic efforts wins him an A rating.
And no matter that the film changed directorial hands and seemed to be more interested in getting a conservative rating by skimming over cocaine use and flamboyant homosexuality, I found enough of fine cinematic touches to raise it above any middling bar.
There’s a scene where Freddie and his girl partner Mary lie in bed, with an upright piano practically serving as the headboard. Freddie reaches out behind his head, casually finger-plunks on some keys, and we hear the first strains of the song Bohemian Rhapsody.
It may have been apocryphal, but then again that’s likely how MacArthur Park or Suite: Judy Blue Eyes or even A Whiter Shade of Pale or any another memorable anthem started — with the first bar of what would become music for a decade, a century, a millennium gets conceived, or finds its initial phrase of gestation — as a whimsical whiff of creativity.
Another scene shows Freddie taking a brief walk from the farmhouse where he and his bandmates have hunkered down for record production. He surveys the landscape before him, a verdant field where tufts of small white flowers inspire him with the first line and melody of Love of My Life.
Yes. Those are enough for me, as is the sequence when the band gets to record, in epic fashion, their mock-opera winner that turns out to be a “six-minute suite consisting of several sections without a chorus: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda.”
As with Radio Gaga, We Will Rock You, and We Are the Champions, it’s foot-stomping territory. And that’s enough for me, as well, very well indeed, to revel in glorious nostalgia.
