Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” in the cinema: Dance over the abyss – culture

The verdict is harsh and unmistakable on the unbridled guys of the New York street gang who call themselves the Jets. After a violent night, marked by macho impulses and deadly misunderstandings, they mocked, physically harassed and threatened the Puerto Rican girl Anita, and for this they now get the R-word, pronounced with disgust in their voice: “From you are rapists become, rapist … “MeToo has also sharpened the focus on juvenile delinquency.

Old Valentina speaks this judgment in the new film adaptation of “West Side Story” by Steven Spielberg, this character did not exist in the first film, 1961, by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. Valentina took over his soda drugstore from her husband Doc after his death, where the West Side boys used to gather and make their decisions. “You make this world lousy …”, Doc had groaned in the first film adaptation after the incident with Anita. “We didn’t make it,” was the reply from the boys. You know they are one social disease there is also a kind of wild pride in it.

Rita Moreno is Valentina, she will be ninety this Saturday, and in 1961 she played Anita, the abused girl, and won an Oscar for best supporting role. Valentina plays her with an intoxicating mixture of sadness and exhaustion, since there are decades of experience with the Hollywood system, which offered her nothing but exotic supporting roles, right up to the Indian woman.

It may well be that now, after sixty years, she will get another Oscar for the new “West Side Story” (the first film won ten Oscars at the time). If the academy comes, the industry journal asks Variety, pass this film, which is a rare alternative “to both blockbuster overkill and indie angst”.

Spielberg counters the power of the evergreens with sophisticated camera ideas

“West Side Story” is inspired by Europe, but has been part of American mythology for over half a century. Leonard Bernstein’s balance between exotic mambo and American pathos is always thrilling, and the nimble verses of the young Stephen Sondheim always hit the point. (Sondheim is shortly before the premiere of the film died in November at the age of 91, but still expressed his satisfaction with Spielberg’s version.)

The power of the evergreens (“Somewhere”, “America”) continues Spielberg initially had clever camera ideas opposite. Particularly exciting, however, are moments when the film pauses, that sinister whistling that signals the presence of the gangs without being seen is one of the great eerie tones of cinema history. Juvenile delinquency was a hot topic in the fifties, including in the movies, between moralizing head shaking and fascination, with James Dean and Elvis. And of course there have been a lot of films from the seventies that showed America as an immigrant country, especially New York as a melting pot, by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese or Ang Lee.

The hard drawings of recent years – MeToo, migration and racism, excesses of violence against blacks, the division of the population in the Trump years – have robbed the Romeo and Juliet story of its tragic innocence, especially the struggles between the white jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. Spielberg cast the Sharks and their girls with Latin American actors and dancers, starting with the young Rachel Zelger as Maria – in the 1961 version, Natalie Wood, the young American star, was Maria.

Spielberg’s screenwriter Tony Kushner often lets the kids from Puerto Rico speak Spanish, they are aped for by the jets and, in return, like to address them as Polack. Space gets tight on the streets of New York in the mid-fifties. A rubble film, it kicks in with the wrecking balls that make way for the major Lincoln Center construction project. A shadow of gentrification over the Upper West Side, where only hard-hitting social welfare and police arbitrariness are provided for the youth.

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Two of the kids won Tony Kushner’s profile. Tony, the unfortunate Romeo, has just got out of jail, he beat up a man, and Bernardo, Maria’s brother who leads the Sharks, is aiming for a career as a boxer. Both of them have a fatal propensity for violence, encouraged by the patriarchal system of society, an exclusion that can only be responded to by working closely together. Kushner and Spielberg brought the ecstatic “America” ​​number to the streets, a whirlwind of happiness and freedom that conjures up Latin American carnivals.

Racism, bourgeois narrow-mindedness, male arrogance, contempt for women … The judgment against young people is harsh and unambiguous in Spielberg’s film. In the first film adaptation, 1961, one gets an idea of ​​where this social deformation comes from: of a longing, a desire that has to be suppressed and denied. In women, this desire surges to the surface, which makes this first draft darker, more unpredictable, more unsettling.

West Side Story, 2021 – directed by Steven Spielberg. Book: Tony Kushner. Based on the musical by Arthur Laurents. Songs: Stephen Sondheim. Music: Leonard Bernstein. Camera: Janusz Kaminski. Editing: Michael Kahn, Sarah Broshar. With: Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose, Davod Alvarez, Corey Stoll, Mike Faist, Rita Moreno. 20th Century Fox, 156 minutes. Theatrical release: December 9th, 2021.