‘Brigadoon’ or — The Colour of Dreamstuff?
The opening to Brigadoon (1954) is, quite frankly, bloody ridiculous: everything is fake, nothing is natural and the result is an environment so blatantly artificial it would make Roberto Rossellini puke his guts up. This isn’t a complaint, however, because it’s also one of the most astonishingly beautiful openings to a movie I’ve ever seen. The way that sunrise moves!
Total control over this world allows director Vincente Minnelli and his art department (who needs God when you have Cedric Gibbons?) the ability to manipulate light and colour with a precision not found outside of a Golden Age Disney animation. And if ‘Brigadoon’ is about anything, it’s about the growing and fading of light.
The plot might be almost childishly simple — an American tourist, Gene Kelly, falls in love with Cyd Charisse (her costumes are so outrageous she looks less like she hails from the Highlands and more like she’s just travelled by spaceship from the planet Venus) only to discover that her and her village of Brigadoon will soon vanish forever — but that’s only the surface narrative. The real story is wordlessly told in the waxing and waning of radiant luminescence, a luminescence that carries the almost unbearable message that, one day, our own glow will also disappear. So sure, the tale might appear charming and adorable but the underlying thrust is of complete annihilation, which could explain why ‘Brigadoon’ has less in common with anything remotely Scottish and more with something unspeakably apocalyptic developed at the RAND Corporation.
And there is absolutely nothing Scottish about ‘Brigadoon’ in the slightest because, despite all the kilts and dancing, at no point does the film contain anything we’d automatically associate with this proud and illustrious nation: the S-bend toilet, Aztec Camera, Viv Lumsden, Sydney Devine, a nervous reluctance to recognise its own explicit involvement in the slave trade, Arthur Montford and STV, etc. NONE of that is here. Instead, we’re presented with a multidimensional eschatological feverdream that’s chromatically berserk.
This is not an exaggeration because the otherworldly softness of the lurid colours and hues in ‘Brigadoon’ (green = birth; brown = death) is almost impossible to describe. Add onto that the mind-boggling complexities of recreating Scotland entirely indoors like some sort of gigantic pop-up book (keeping everything in focus — backdrops, sets, scenery, moving actors, etc — must have been a challenge in juggling optics, angles and perspectives so insanely complicated it must’ve fried cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg’s brain) and you realise this was never about reality but the creation of a ravishing dream-state. And it’s gorgeous.
I loved ‘Brigadoon’. As a musical it’s nothing remarkable, but as an exercise in colour and depth perception it’s a work of demented genius. It might appear sweet and cosy but Minnelli was always best at emotional brutality so we can’t help but notice he’s raising the only question worth asking in life — can you appreciated the dream before it is inevitably over?
It’s why we don’t buy that ending. Tommy never makes it back to Brigadoon; he’s dead from exposure on a Scottish hillside somewhere, one stiffened arm forever reaching out for a light that’ll never return as his corpse is slowly eaten by a highland fox.
