Monday, December 15, 2008

Quiet Life



Does anyone have a theory why Ray Davies' character sings directly into the camera for the Quiet Life number? No one else does. Gives it a very music video feel, no?

4 comments:

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky said...

It's a weird moment. On the one hand, it's the most willfully artificial: we are shown the set from a side, a sort of Jerry Lewis moment with the building looking like a giant doll house--and Davies sings into the camera, which breaks with a lot of people's notions of "realism." But there's also something very intimate about it, even despite the various caricatures (perhaps the caricatures, in their earnestness, are what make it so private). It's very hermetic, very self-contained. It separates itself from the film in some way. I've never been quite sure as to whether I think it works or not...

Peter Rinaldi said...

Davies has a wonderful charm that keeps pulling us back from the weirdness of the chaos into a sort of innocent whimsy.
You're right, it does stand off from the other scenes.
If he wasn't singing to the camera (us) he would be singing to himself, which would make it sad, in a way. In this form, he is sharing with us.

david said...

I may be too much of a fan for this place. Davies is singing to the camera because he always sings in the conversational style. I mean, he's not Nick Drake all moony and broody, whose dreamy songs we "overhear"?

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky said...

Well, David, you have a good point--most of the singers in the film wrote their own songs and therefore kind of dictated the style of their musical numbers. So Bowie's is a big production number and Davies' has him singing very intimately against a backdrop of ordinary activities--very Ray Daviesish.