A young man, a trumpet player, ducks into a crowded subway, eventually lucking onto a pole around which a young woman, a perfectly lovely stranger, is already draped. Circumstances push them together. Their feet move in a slow dance. Hands, gripping the pole, touch.
All the while the subway is rocking in rhythm, reminding us the A Train is still the quickest way to Harlem.
That's one of the more subdued fantasies in Damien Chazelle's gliding, retro musical, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench.
Except for a road trip to New York, Chazelle shot Guy and Madeline with a camera over his shoulder in Boston during his final year at Harvard. His characters are recognizable student types: Guy, fresh out of Berklee College of Music, is everyone he wants to be as a trumpeter – frail and beautiful as Miles one minute, fervid as Clifford Brown the next. But when he puts down his horn, Guy is just another bewildered kid stumbling through the dark, trying not to break anything.
Madeline, meanwhile, reminds us of the faun at the back of American Lit classes in university – the one who never spoke, but wrote beautifully, acing every exam. Predictably, she and Guy come together and disintegrate – this happens in the first 10 minutes. And then spend the rest of the movie wondering what happened.
Madeline (graceful Desiree Garcia) does her most effective musing out loud. Dancing in the park or falling into a Busby Berkeley tap number with fellow waitresses in a restaurant, then breaking into song: "Dancing, yes, I was dancing/With angels that come down on a lark/And what's funny, I think I found a spark/When I kissed the boy in the park."
But don't let the innocent "spark/park" rhyme fool you. Chazelle isn't interested in thirties-style Lullabies of Broadway – not much anyway. The film period he has dropped Guy and Madeline into is Paris and New York of the fifties and sixties. The movie begins with Madeline twirling an umbrella – a nod to Jacques Demy's musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. And the bemused melancholy here is Truffaut's. An alternate title could be Don't Shoot the Trumpet Player.
The New York is that of John Cassavetes, the grandfather of American independent movies. The movie's colour and racial scheme is black and white. Guy is African-American, Madeline, Caucasian. And their relationship reminds us of Cassavetes's 1959 film Shadows – another movie where white seekers search for illumination in jazz bohemia.
Except it's all different. Just as Jason Palmer, the talented trumpeter who plays Guy, quotes from Satchmo to Miles Davis, but settles into his own groove, Chazelle, at age 25, is his own filmmaker.
His tone is lighter, more fanciful, than the directors mentioned above (with the possible exception of Demy). And he's no escape-artist time traveller, camping out in old musicals. Guy and Madeline is a decidedly modern film, whose frightened, impulsive, charming characters could walk into our lives tomorrow.
Madeline might serve us coffee at breakfast; Guy, music in a club after work.
We'd be lucky if they did.
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
- Written and directed by Damien Chazelle
- Starring Jason Palmer, Desiree Garcia and Sandha Khin
- Classification: PG
Special to The Globe and Mail