Moe and Curly: Hikari Mitsushima and Stephanie in Pride
Thanks to end-of-the-month deadlines, I managed to miss the Gay Pride Parade on Sunday; however I wasn’t able to avoid the 3:20 screening of Shusuke Kaneko’s Pride at the IFC center (as part of the NY Asian Film Festival). What was billed as bitchy backstage comedy with two rival opera singers continually kneeing each other on the way to the top fell flat, but still provided some interesting fodder for my Japanese-fluent boyfriend and I over okonomiyaki post-screening.
Hikari Mitsushima plays Moe, an aspiring opera singer from the wrong side of the tracks (“Senju. Not the best,” sniffs one diva, which apparently sets Moe off Single White Female-style). In contrast to her over-the-top-attempted-matricide-bubbly-geisha Eve Harrington is J-Pop princess Stephanie’s Shio, whose own world comes crashing down when endowed-daddy loses his company (and fortune). Both enter a record label-sponsored vocal competition with the top prize a study in Italy–Moe as a means of clawing herself to the top, Shio in hopes of regaining a part of what she once had. When Moe makes a dig about Stephanie’s dead mother, the claws come out and Stephanie collapses before performing “Casta Diva.” The rest of the plot takes about 90 minutes to accomplish what a strong hour could easily encompass, ending in a Chicago-type fashion where (surprise!) the girls sing a duo before (spoiler alert!) going their own separate ways. Of course, there’s a good amount of drama in between that would make even Puccini or Verdi double over from melodrama overdose.
It’s clear that the author of the manga (on which the movie is based) or Kaneko–it’s unclear which as I’ve yet to find the manga in English–knew their opera. The plot in and of itself seems an homage to Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor–fighting divas each hoping to be the prima donna, the record label executive character Jirro the impresario. Shio’s father mentions proposing to her mother (herself a former diva called the Asian Canary) on the Ponte Vecchio–a phrase reverberated in Moe’s performance of “O Mio Babbino Caro” (right before she makes the REAL “o snap!” mother comment). The geisha (Madama Butterfly) club that both girls work for is called Prima Donna, another cafe is called Figaro. Shio, herself a Traviata-like character, wears a ridiculously fantastic pink dress–replete with mille feuille skirt–and, upon her collapse, falls like Violetta in the third act, looking like a wilted camillia.
The Italian sensibility, on par with a bel canto plot, seems to work well with the Japanese sense–at times almost kabukian in the drama. My boyfriend often notes similarity in the cadence between his fluent Japanese and my near-fluent (and Roman accented) Italian; which made these two worlds seem to collide rather nicely on screen. I had only wished opera was carried further out as a central theme to the movie–though with two pop stars they did need to lapse into that genre for an all-out show-stopping 11 o’clock number that reeked of Chicago “I hate you but we’re performing together” schtick. Moe’s character–a character that seems to collapse after the first snide remark about her less-prestigious school–is a testament to opera’s hard-to-shake elitist stereotype. Herself a voice student, she still says “I’ve only seen it on TV. The opera’s too expensive.” Later, in the Cardiff or Met Council-like audition, the audience is sparse with one person per every three or four empty seats. Looking around the IFC theatre, there was a similar spread.
Let’s hope it was because Pride had its own, eponymous, competition going on right outside.
