These Very Stars

These Very Stars was a motion picture extravaganza built around seven major musical numbers. Its kaleidoscopic choreography and visual effects incorporated over a thousand precision dancers and ice skaters. I will do my best to describe it here, but I must emphasize to the reader that mere words cannot begin to capture the grandeur and scale of this film.

The film opens on a beach, with a beautiful princess (we know she is a princess, for she is literally wearing a crown!) sitting chastely beside a fisherman. They read a book together, and share a few clementines. As the scene unfolds, we watch the princess betray the fisherman (after some initial hesitation) in order to avoid losing her title and royal privileges.

Pretty secret smile: The song begins with the princess on the left side of the frame, illuminated by a narrow shaft of light. Rose petals rain down from above as she gazes sadly at nothing in particular. The camera slowly zooms out to reveal a cross section of a whale carcass. Ribbons of gleaming seaweed hang from the ribcage, and mounds of flesh are piled up here and there, with agitated flies swarming over them. Inside the carcass is a repulsive hermit, played by Dimitri Phalaenopsis. Over swelling violins, the hermit praises the princess's beauty, her innocence, her watery smile. And in staccato asides to the audience, he remarks, "...and how easily corrupted she will be, for she is already on the path to perdition! How easily she lies. How satisfying it will be to deform her soul."

As the song ends, the hermit sidles up behind the princess and taps her on the shoulder. Startled out of her reverie–and possibly beginning to comprehend the gravity of her actions–she starts screaming.

It is at this moment that the next song, Quiet now, quiet now, begins. This song is a lullaby--a slow waltz with a simple melody, sung in Dimitri Phalaenopsis's resonant bass voice. The hermit embraces the princess until she calms down, all the while drawing her further into the whale carcass and convincing her that she did nothing wrong. As the lullaby continues, he gently manipulates her memory so that he becomes the guilty party. "You did nothing wrong," he assures her. "I did nothing wrong," she repeats. "It was I who lied," he sings. "You were the one…" she repeats.

Wrong places and faces: This number takes place back in the palace. It is dazzling and disorienting, with lines of dancers in garish makeup marching up and down impossible staircases–some that seem to defy gravity, others that abruptly disappear, still others that seem to spiral infinitely. "The things that once comforted me now mock me," the princess sings. "This home is no longer my home. If only I could find a way out of this nightmare."

By this point in the song, the dancers are no longer empty-handed: they are carrying chairs, linens, samovars, serving utensils, and empty platters on their physics-defying journeys. The audience realizes that they are preparing for a banquet. Meanwhile, singing in counterpoint to the princess, a group of spies discusses their plan to kidnap the banquet's guest of honor and ultimately start a war.

When the panic sets in: This is a polyphonic song, performed by the princess, the handsome hermit, and the the banquet's guest of honor: an ambassador from a far-off land. The hall is set for an extravagant feast. Peonies, chrysanthemums, and amaryllis tumble from pitchers and stain the tablecloths with their saffron-colored pollen. Guests dressed in velvet and silk preen and sigh. A procession of dancers brings a series of grotesque dishes past the disoriented princess: A roast pig with a writhing tentacle coming out of its ass; aspic molded in the shape of a penis, with chicken feet sticking out of it like the finials of a crown; rotten papayas with tiny eyeballs in place of seeds. By some enchantment, the hermit's face appears in the reflection of empty platters. He taunts her: "Isn't is wicked, princess? Isn't it sinful, princess? Isn't it delicious, princess?" He urges her to give in to her basest desires and become his queen. The princess, a coloratura soprano, responds--not in words, but in runs and trills that careen up and down the staff.

An ambassador from a far off country, a mezzo-soprano, is seated next to the princess. (I should note here that the actress who played the ambassador bore a striking resemblance to director Arabella Rye, except that the actress was prettier.) Repeating the leitmotif from "Quiet now, quiet now," the ambassador sings, "How pale you look! Your tiny hand is like ice! Will you take my arm? Please, let's get some air." The ambassador's words seem to momentarily break through to the princess, who abruptly stops singing to gaze at the ambassador.

Meanwhile, as the music crescendos, the spies rappel from the glass roof and hang about 30 feet above the ambassador, preparing to drop a net on her. The tension in the music builds, with tympani rolls and tremulous strings; then, just as the net starts to fall, the princess grabs the ambassador's hand and drags her out of the banquet hall. A series of cymbal crashes ends the song.

Pretty secret smile (reprise): This seductive and menacing reprise, sung by the princess this time, is re-set in a minor key and in halting 7/8 time. The whale carcass has been transformed into a temple of marble, with soaring ceilings and distant skylights that admit slits of light. The hermit has transformed into a young, fit man--Dimitri Phalaenopsis, basically--wearing a plague doctor mask and little else. On either side of him are attendants who are nude but for semi-opaque plastic carapaces that resemble corsets or orthopedic devices intended to correct the curvature of the spine.

The princess slowly circles the hermit, whispering in his ear, and running lengths of thin rope up and down his body. She then begins tenderly restraining him with the rope, creating lines that divide his body in visually pleasing ways, bisecting his chest, drawing the eye down to his crotch, pinching the hair on his upper thighs, and causing the flesh to bulge suggestively. All the while, we hear the ambassador's voice in the distance, asking where the princess is, and urging her to leave the hermit. The princess pulls on a line hanging from the ceiling, raising the hermit's his body above the ground so that he is prone, head dramatically thrown back, one knee raised, the ankle tied to the thigh. The princess then rushes out of the temple, scoops the startled ambassador into her arms, and runs offscreen. The hermit bellows and thrashes, cursing her for tricking him and trying to free himself.

These very stars: This completely wordless song is as vast and rapturous as the previous numbers were chaotic and claustrophobic. It is the centerpiece of the entire film. The music is spare: arpeggios programmed on what sounded like an early analog synth. It was performed by six hundred ice skaters in black leotards with LED lights representing stars hot glued onto them. The stage featured several hydraulic platforms, also covered in ice, that rose and fell with the music, so when shot from above on film that was underexposed by several stops, it gave the illusion of depth and darkness, against which constellations--the orchid, the cuttlefish, the wasp--morphed, one into another. All in all, only thirteen fingers were lost during the filming of this song.

Land without rivers: This song, performed by the fisherman who was betrayed by the princess at the beginning of the film, is a dirge expressing a longing for death. The scene begins in extreme close up, with a fly crawling across the fisherman's lip and and stumbling over his beard. Thus begins an excruciatingly slow zoom out. We see the fisherman first, and then, in a cross-section of the building, the men and women in the prison cells adjacent to him. Their voices harmonize with the plodding, repetitive chorus. The camera continues slowly zooming out, and by the end of the song, the frame is filled with hundreds of people, singing in a building that looked suspiciously like one of Tux's infamous mega-prisons.