COLMA: THE MUSICAL will Make You FEEL Again
Everyone knows that both musicals and irony have high overdose potential – consume too much of either one, and you’ll feel sickly for days. Overloading on syrupy musicals can deaden the senses + leave you weak, while over-indulging in irony will make one vomit the putridness right back out. A measured combination of the two, however, can do just the opposite – it can make you feel (alive, happy, in tune) once again. Maybe it’ll just make you feel, period. In its portrayal of three friends from Colma (a real California town marked by vast cemeteries, where the dead outnumber the living) on the brink of high school graduation, COLMA: THE MUSICAL triumphantly combines pathos + adolescent self-mockery, making the heart soar in multiple directions simultaneously. It opens today.
In this intentionally absurd surrealist sequence, dead couples rise again to ballroom dance while an oblivious L.A. Renigen & H.P. Mendoza warble, "This is my future main residence / Just deadwallking nowhere and everywhere / No one and everyone knows your name."
See what today's New York Times had to say:
The teenagers in “Colma: The Musical” don’t really burst into song, uvulas violently quivering and fists grasping for fame. For the most part they just slide into the music and lyrics as if slipping into the comfort of bed, far from the world and its racket. An itty-bitty movie with a great big heart, “Colma” is about three young people on the brink of that terrifying adventure called life, but it’s also about how we learn to give voice — joyfully, honestly, loudly — to the truest parts of ourselves, parts not everyone else hears....The coming-of-age story is universal, but too often it seems as if it’s the only story that American independent filmmakers are now remotely interested in. At first “Colma” looks a lot like more of the same, even if it didn’t play at Sundance: Three teenagers moping about mostly because, well, they’re teenagers. Yet a large part of what makes the movie refreshing, even when it’s not always especially fresh, is the matter-of-fact way it approaches youth as a given instead of a crucible. In “Colma” being young (or gay or Filipino) isn’t a recipe for automatic disaster; it’s what helps define these specific characters at this specific time. It’s a poignantly brief moment that — much like home — they may only really know after they leave.
The idea of youth as a cause for self-discovery works well with the movie’s belief in music as an intimate means of self-expression. Mr. Mendoza’s hooky songs, both the short and semisweet and the epically narrative, look as much outward as they do inward. Yet even when the songs convey a sense of the larger world, they remain as personal as a confession. When the three friends sing the movie’s opener, “Colma Stays,” both separately and together, they are literally traveling through a physical space (“Everybody has their call/And everyone in Colma ends up at the mall”) that has also shaped their interior landscapes (“Colma stays, a place I was born/Wanting, sad, forsaken, forlorn”).
See? COLMA blends the most magical-est elements of musical theater and irony: naivete and self-consciousness, into a surprisingly sweet marriage. It had the staff talking non-stop when it screened at the AAIFF last year.
(L.A. Renigen’s loveliness might have had something to do with our fixation, too, but I should stop now lest I give away too much.) Watch it at The Quad (34 W. 13th St.).
Posted by elisa.