Brigadoon USA | 1954 | 108 minutes Credits In Brief Director Vincente Minnelli A classic - if not the classic - Minnelli musical, Brigadoon is an explicit statement about (and Screenplay Alan Jay Lerner partial criticism of) the notion that an artist only lives through his art, preferring its reality to the world's. The film begins with a disenchanted Kelly in flight from 'civilised' New York, Songs Alan Jay Lerner, lost in the Scottish Highlands and stumbling on the legendary village of Brigadoon which Frederick Loewe only appears for one day each century. There he meets the love of his life Fiona, only to Music Conrad Salinger discover both the truth about Brigadoon and that some of its inhabitants want the real life Photography Joseph Ruttenberg he is fleeing from, even though it will destroy Brigadoon. Disillusioned when the villagers kill the would-be escapees, Kelly leaves. But in New York, amidst the chaos of modern Cast living, he discovers he is yearning for Fiona and Brigadoon. He returns to Scotland where Tommy Albright Gene Kelly his faith (and Fiona's love) conjures up Brigadoon. This time he settles there, accepting Jeff Douglas Van Johnson that the price of happiness is to live but one day a century. As this description of the film makes clear, it (and Minnelli's musicals in general) is escapist to say the least. However, Fiona Campbell Cyd Charisse Minnelli's musicals must be seen alongside his dramas which examine the other side of the Jane Ashton Elaine Stewart coin, the problems of confronting reality, rather than evading it or constructing one's own. Time Out Films about magic automatically require some additional suspension of disbelief; to fully experience escape, logic usually needs to be pushed further aside than usual. Even so, it’s fair to expect at least some internally rational foundation to be established for the supernatural system presented, some reasonable explanation to quell inquiring minds. Brigadoon refuses to indulge even this basic condition, which means that for skeptics (this author included), the story of a magical village nestled in the Scottish highlands is bound to be a tough sell. Set within a rustic mirage preserved inside of an everlasting spell, it forces viewers to accept not only that such a situation could exist (that’s the easy part) but that living in this fantastical diorama would somehow be a desirable arrangement. This being a Vincente Minnelli film, the fanciful location is at least aesthetically alluring. Bursting with bouncy songs, beautiful women, tartan costumes and friendly livestock, the village of Brigadoon has a definite charm, a perfectly preserved relic of 18th century Scotland by way of Disneyland street theatre. But the method by which this is preservation is achieved (emerging from the mists only one day every hundred years) raises all sorts of questions. Living one year in Brigadoon, for example, would shoot you 36,500 years into the future. What guarantee is there that earth would still be inhabitable at this point, or that the broad swath of verdant hill country it occupies wouldn’t have been demolished to make way for tract housing? This doesn’t even take into account Brigadoon’s ominous catch: if one solitary citizen ranges beyond its borders, the entire place disappears forever. Brigadoon_3-200x300This is a mountainous challenge for any logical-minded person, but the near-nonsensical suspension of disbelief burdening the viewer almost seems like a calculated choice. This is a film about accepting the mystery, about ignoring rational concerns and reveling in the spectacle at hand. All of the satisfaction to be found in Brigadoon flows from this basic concession. Losing their way during a hunting trip, Tommy (Gene Kelly) and Jeff (Van Johnson) stumble upon the charming burg on its third day of magical existence, during the occasion of a wedding that’s turned the place even more festive than usual. Taken in by the town’s welcoming but enigmatic citizens, the outsiders soon discover that things are a little too good to be true. This doesn’t stop love from blooming, or songs from erupting, especially because the town’s lonely lasses quickly descend upon the hapless bachelors. The conceit is a pretty thin one, but Minnelli pours an admirable amount of energy into making his case for this town as a wondrous aesthetic locale, constructed on a series of gorgeous sets. In some ways this is typical territory for the director. He evinces a continued interest in creating filmic spaces which employ pure aesthetics as their means of communication. There isn’t much being communicated in this film, but what’s being said is delivered with sparkling directness. The town of Brigadoon has its everyday concerns, but they’re buffeted by such monumental lengths of sleep, and so completely blanketed by the innate natural beauty of the place, that they become infinitesimal by comparison. The fluidity of time in this pristine Technicolor paradise, with its total removal from the ordinary world, winds up establishing it as an analogue for the timeless autonomy of the cinema, similarly free from quotidian constraints. This becomes even clearer in the hustle and bustle of a third act transition, which returns Jeff and Tommy to New York City, back to Scotland on Screen the routine of jobs and bars and, for Tommy, the planning of his dreaded wedding. Using his innate facility for scene-packing to whip up a restaurant into a steaming cauldron of irritation, Minnelli turns this single set piece into a waking nightmare, overflowing with annoying overheard conversations and defined by a marked lack of personal space. There’s no real symbolic heft to the film’s rejection of the modern world in favor of a timeless bucolic paradise, but the key point is the establishment of that alternative space, its divergence from the usual patterns of modern life. The world can be an exhausting place, but it’s made a little less so thanks to the escape afforded by movies, which always offer the gleaming promise of respite, a fact that Brigadoon holds in almost holy reverence. Jesse Cataldo, http://spectrumculture.com Film-makers on film: Joss Whedon Joss Whedon talks to Siân Stott about Vincente Minnelli's Brigadoon (1954) Joss Whedon comes in singing. Not pop, hip-hop, anything that shows he's got his finger on the pulse of teenage cool, but a snatch of a showtune. That's because the man who created the cult TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly has a curious admission to make - he loves good, old-fashioned musicals. Even so, Brigadoon is an unusual film to rave about. Lerner and Loewe's fantastical romantic tale revolves around two sophisticated New Yorkers (Gene Kelly and Van Johnson) who get lost on a shooting trip in Scotland. When the mist clears, they find themselves in Brigadoon, a town under a spell that comes alive for just one day every 100 years, and there Kelly falls in love with Cyd Charisse. "Brigadoon gets a bad rap," says Whedon. "Vincente Minnelli was supposed to shoot it in Scotland, but couldn't, so it's all very Hollywood and unbearably twee. But I love the fake background and I think that is where Brigadoon should be - it should be in Hollywood, not in Scotland. When they started taking musicals out to real locations, you lost something very beautiful and poetic and totally controlled." The film didn't grab him hard the first time he saw it. "It wasn't like I saw Brigadoon and the world flew open for me, the way it did when I saw Once Upon a Time in the West and I couldn't speak," he recalls. "But I was intrigued and delighted, and I keep coming back to it. I think there's a lot more going on in that movie than people give it credit for." Whedon has a lot of time for Minnelli as a director. "He was a master of the controlled mise-en-scène - he absolutely knew where to put the camera, when to move it, when to let it sit. The Waitin' for My Dearie number that Cyd Charisse sings is, to me, a great teaching tool, because there are nine or more girls singing and dancing in a very small space, yet the scene has an enormous amount of very beautiful choreography, grace and style. It's a prime example of how to do everything with almost nothing, of how to tell the truth emotionally with a musical number. In its quiet way, it taught me an enormous amount." Although Whedon has never made a musical himself, the hour-long episode of Buffy that was conducted entirely in song and dance was, "without a single rival, the most enjoyable one". And his knowledge of choreography in tight spaces stood him in good stead while making Serenity (now available on DVD), a sci-fi action-adventure film set on a claustrophobic spaceship. But perhaps the key to Whedon's love of Brigadoon is the clever way in which the film helps the audience to suspend its disbelief in musicals and magical, disappearing towns. "I would say that the most important part of Brigadoon is Van Johnson's character," he says. "This is a movie that, while completely venerating the classic Hollywood romantic love story, completely deconstructs it at the same time. Johnson is constantly telling you there's no such thing as a musical, that people don't really break into song. "That basic idea of having something that is hiding its intelligence in song and dance and hiding its romanticism in cynicism is to me very difficult but very dazzling.