Imitation of Life

Saw Imitation of Life, an ingeniously clever melodrama. It follows the rags-to-riches life of a Broadway star with many side-stories and discursions. The film is kept ingenious by the major theme of identity vs and mixed with the theme of performance. The Broadway star is an actress. Twice she is accused of "acting." The first time she is being genuine but she is not believed. The second time she is so much an actress that she realizes that she is actually acting. She has a black maid whose daughter is white (she takes after her father, you see.) Her entire life revolves around who she is vs what she seems to be.

There is a secondary theme of interruption. During a beautiful soliloquy, the person being soliloquised to interrupts. During a declaration of love in a narrow hallway, a man bustles through for no damn reason. Later, the phone rings. The star's tedious rags-to-riches story is interrupted by furious, messy 'real' life. A story of the nativity is interrupted by the maid's daughter demanding to know if Jesus was white or black (she fiercely insists that "he was white - like me!") Later on, the daughter's issues drive her to a strip club where she preforms on a stage decorated by masks.

On top of the literary cleverness of the script is an entire cast's-worth of diabolically manipulative and melodramatic performances. The film is smothered in increasingly unwelcome, schmaltzy background music. How much more stark and upbraiding it could have been! I wonder if the music is also, in its way, meant to reenforce the cloying artificiality of the protagonist's life. She lives as if in a dream, blithely relying on her saint-like mammy (who, true to form, has the decency to selflessly die at just the right moment.) and stuffing her daughter in an uber-feminine pink music-box of a bedroom.

Clearly, I thought the film was great. It comes from the 50s and thus isn't quite up to date with the latest thoughts on race (and race is a huge deal in this film.) It goes through great pains to make the maid/protagonist relationship into a symbiosis (rather than a parasitism.) I couldn't really find much fault, apart from the straight-up martyrdom of the maid (vastly entertaining thought: when the maid directs the star's handsome love interest to her will, imagine she has rigged it with dynamite and the rest of the film is just her ghost sitting in the ruins, cackling with glee.) Anyway, the film is quite clever and dances delightfully around this interplay of fiction and reality. There's a lot here and it's quite juicily dramatic to boot. Good, good film.