30 minutes on: “Nashville” | MZ

For this series, MZS begins to write on a film chosen and stops 30 minutes later. On a film that is 50 years old this year…

Robert Altman’s “Nashville” is a portrait of the United States on the eve of the Bicentenary, but it sometimes seems to describe the United States fifty years later. I saw him on the big screen during his reissue of the fiftieth anniversary and I was eliminated by his audacity and his perception.

As is the case with most Altman films, “Nashville” is an overall piece, with a dozen recurring characters, and almost as many players floating. The opening sequence of credits imitates television ads for compilation albums that were popular at the time, an advertiser shouting the name of each artist while their face appears on the screen. The introductory section cuts musical performances in two studios: the star of the country-Western Jingoistical Hamilton (Henry Gibson) interpreting a bicentennial themed song which is strongly based on the military record of her family, and the singer Gospel Blanche Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) recording a song with the singers black history. These two characters are among the many indelible creations of the film and are independent as individuals. But they also communicate the cultural fracture separating factions which have been fighting for control of the United States since the civil war, and which are still fighting today. One is reactionary, the air nostalgically back sometimes which never existed. The other is progressive, impatiently waiting for a truly egalitarian democracy which did not exist at the time, and seems more distant now than in 1975.

The film takes its time to present all the other characters and organize them around a concert on the theme of the bicentenary which must be titled by Barbara Jean (Ronnee Blakely), who makes her triumphant return to play after having survived what was described to the public as a burning accident but was really a nervous decomposition. Jeff Goldblum has one of his first roles of attention as an apparently silent hippie that goes up in town on a gigantic motorcycle and is presented by making magic tricks in a counter in a restaurant. Keith Carradine undoubtedly plays the most prosperous musician of The Bunch, an author-songwriter and Casanova who reads several female characters in the distribution and is by omission to convince them that his catchy love song “I’m Easy” (written and interpreted by Carradine, and the future winner of a better original Oscar song) is about each of them. Ned Beatty is Delbert Reese, Linnea’s husband and a political organizer and lawyer. Delbert’s fixation on the fact that everything works, no matter how bizarre and bad things make him look like a cousin of another great political catalyst of the 1975 cinema year, the mayor of friendship in “Jaws”. He does not want to solve problems, he just wants them to disappear as if by magic.

Altman worked from a script by the ordinary collaborator of Altman Joan Tewkesbury, based on his observations of the Nashville visit as an foreigner. In the attractive Altman tradition, they ended up serving more a set of suggestions than a closely followed plan, although certain basic elements remain, including a stack on the highway which causes a traffic jam. You could argue that the English radio journalist on a visit (Geraldine Chaplin) who superimposes her own preconceived concepts on the city is a slightly satirical wink in the way the source material has occurred.

“Nashville” was shot dead in Nashville and the surrounding area in the summer of 1974, more than a year after the last American combat troops were withdrawn from a defeat in Vietnam which has torn the country politically. It was also in summer that the president of the time, Nixon – whose fascist beliefs had led the country to the edge of the constitutional crisis – accusing and decided to resign rather than to face a conviction and the suppression. (“If the president does, that means that it is not illegal,” he told interviewer David Frost.)

The highlight, a huge rally of concerts almost all major characters, was shot in the Centennial Park in Nashville on August 28, twenty years after Nixon left the shame and Gerald Ford, his vice-president, replaced him (and forgive controversial). We consider the United States around 2025 as a violent place in the heart, with some of the most shocking brutals led by state agents. But this is also what the late 1960s and the early 1970s look like. There were political motivation attacks and banks and armored cars; terrorist attacks and diversion of planes; strikes and protests that have transformed into violence through police misconduct; The assassinations and attempted assassinations of public officials, and a collective fear that new horrors have hidden in every corner.

It wreaked havoc on the political body. “Nashville” captures this. The exhaustion lessons engulfed through each frame of the film, as well as its nihilistic twin hedonism. People are dependent on alcohol, drugs, sex, attention and perhaps the worst of everything, of hope. All this is a distraction of misery. An advertising team for a third-party presidential candidate drives through the city in a truck of sounds throwing nonsense of self-control. He is against the electoral college, the national anthem, the oil companies and the lawyers to do nothing in the congress, but we never hear what he is for.

The wife of Haven Hamilton, Lady Pearl (Barbara Baxley), sums up the discomfort which would define the second half of the 1970s, and who comes from dreams of bloodshed and dotted to the 1960s, when she derives in a reverie with democratic death Robert F. Kennedy, one of the many representatives of hope that was killed at that time. “I worked for him,” she said. I worked here, I worked across the country, I worked in California, in Stockton. Well, Bobby came here and spoke and he went down to Memphis, then he even went to Stockton California and spoke of Santa Fe train in the old Santa Fe deposit. Oh, he was a magnificent man. Just frightened.

The myopia of “Nashville” characters is funny and poignant. They were overturned by life and withdrew in themselves-and it seems that the times themselves are partly responsible. The utopian fantasies of the 1960s were struck by retrograde elements of culture, paving the way in the 1970s, in which the political fire of counter-culture was extinguished, leaving only the rebellion based on life. It was called the decade of Me for a reason. The resentment policy is that all the characters have, if they want to be political. Most do not do so, apart from wishing that the world is not so cruel. The character of Barbara Harris, Albuquerque, a traveling singer, warns: “If we do not live peaceful, there will be nothing in our graves, except the Clorox bottles and the plastic fly mouths with red dots on” EM “. The closing song, also written by Carradine, is a hymn to abandon and check, entitled “He does not worry”. One of the words is: “You can say / that I am not free / But that does not worry me.” It is the anthem of the frog in the pot which continues to revise the amount of heat that it can endure.

It was my first visualization of Nashville on a very large screen (all the other times had been on the domestic video or in a classroom) and the scale not only revealed that small details that I had never noticed, but made me realize that I was wrong on its point of view. The director has a reputation for cynic or misanthropic. This is not true. A friend who saw “Nashville” later said that it was a more compassionate film than he remembered. I felt the same thing.