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DIRECTED BY: Ulli Lommel
FEATURING: Ulli Lommel, Ken Letner, Thom Jones, Geoffrey Barker, Ann Price, Galyn Görg
PLOT: A mentalist has himself cryogenically frozen to escape the Nazi regime, only to be thawed out amidst another fascist regime: suburban America in 1984, where hyper-conservative parents hope to use his talents to undo the rock-and-roll perversions of their children.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: A deeply earnest musical that isn’t afraid to look silly—and does, quite often. Strangers in Paradise wants to speak to the young while addressing hot-button issues, a formula that is catnip for us because there are so many ways for it to go wrong, none of which come anywhere close to “normal.” In that respect, Strangers in Paradise really can’t miss, with its direct comparisons of Nazis to Reagan Republicans. But there’s also real talent here: a surprisingly strong set of songs, excellent choreography, and enough good ideas to give the bad ideas competition.
COMMENTS: If you read any biographical information about Ulli Lommel, you might be fooled into thinking that you’ve gleaned a little insight into how he might have developed his highly unusual career. Born in the waning months of World War II in part of Germany now located inside Poland, his parents purportedly smuggled baby Ulli out of the city wrapped up in a rug. As a teenager, it’s said that he played music with Elvis Presley during the King’s tenure in the Army. His early acting career included a role in a Russ Meyer adaptation of Fanny Hill. He appeared in Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s debut feature and became a regular in that director’s company, with roles in Whitty and World on a Wire. When one of his own directorial efforts attracted the attention of Andy Warhol, Lommel came to America, where he became particularly attracted to films with music, such as Jack Palance’s rock western Cocaine Cowboys, and punk pioneer Richard Hell’s Blank Generation. So there you have it: a historical fear of Nazis, a strong relationship with the avant-garde, and an affinity for a rockin’ beat.
I provide you with all of this background to tell you that none of it adequately explains the path that might lead a person to make Strangers in Paradise. The end product is such a wild tonal mishmash, such a startling blend of amateur and professional skills, such an earnest and serious-minded piece of cheese, that it’s remarkable to think that it all spawns from the mind of one man. Instead of developing a singular voice, it simultaneously adopts multiples.
Strangers in Paradise lets you know just what kind of intestinal fortitude it has right from the beginning, when we meet our hero, the renowned mentalist Jonathan Sage (played by Lommel himself), telling Adolf Hitler (also Lommel) that he won’t work for him. To his face! You can’t get much more principled than that! While Sage can make a dedicated German soldier forsake the cause, he can’t do the same to Hitler, so he hightails it to London, where he becomes the headliner in a club that features tunes that sound more like the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies than Glenn Miller. (That said, the jazzy “Nobody” is the first of several tunes that’s a legitimate bop.) With the Luftwaffe raining hellfire down upon the city, Sage decides his capture is imminent and that he must go into a cryogenic freeze until fascism is eliminated—his second questionable decision so far.
It’s a guarantee that he’s going to wake up and find fascism in a new form, and the surprise and charm of Strangers in Paradise is that it will appear as 80s-era moral extremism. The sight of their children marching en masse to their local performance halls (in broad daylight, mind you) to watch their favorite punk stars galvanizes the shocked and appalled parents of cul-de-sac America. They attempt to use technology to solve the problem—a device called the Repent-O-Gram tries to literally change the minds of a parade of punk rockers, prostitutes, and gamblers—but the cure never takes, probably because all these sinners look fantastic and sing about how enjoyable they find their vices (in the slick dance jam “I Want It All”). Why on Earth would they convert to become these drab dullards?
Sage seems the answer to their prayers, and his resurrection demonstrates just how unusual Paradise is as a musical. The typical rule of the form is that characters turn to song when mere words are no longer enough to contain the emotions that have built up. Well, just forget that rule, because here, we get songs because Lommel and company have a cool idea for a song. First, the scientists who are planning to de-ice the mentalist launch into a Devo pastiche called “Lovely Day to Control the World.” When the process doesn’t go smoothly, we immediately segue into the bluesy “Doctor’s Orders,” a Cop Rock reject that contains this brilliant quatrain:
Give him a thousand cc’s of love
And a thousand cc’s of your hot stuff
And if that doesn’t bring him around
Put him back in his box and dig a hole in the ground.
Most of the songs in Strangers in Paradise are actually quite good, and when accompanied with the genuinely terrific choreography by Sarah Elgart, there’s a really strong case for dusting the material off and trying to put it on a stage somewhere. What’s fascinating about the project is that the unexpected success of the musical is inversely proportional to its utter failure as a piece of social commentary.
Lommel has a big target in the form of humorless religious extremists who want to stomp on anything that makes them uncomfortable. Unfortunately, he paints them all with the same lack of nuance, which blunts his message severely. It’s a solid piece of satire when the self-righteous parents convince Sage to use his powers on a particularly swishy man and a butch lesbian punk star (in their showcase number “Cross the Line”), and they are made to fall for each other in the sappiest way possible. It’s considerably less edgy when Sage turns the tables by transforming the gay-and-punk-hating parents wholesale into gay punks. It’s not exactly the blow for freedom of expression that Lommel might think. When Sage sees the error of his fascist-enabling ways in his brooding vamp “The Same Old Song and Dance,” the visuals tell us that the Nazis and the Moral Majority rhyme, but Lommel hasn’t really made the case.
Strangers in Paradise does what it can with its limitations, like the way all neighborhoods seem to be the same under-construction suburb, or how there are only two or three people providing the vocals for all the songs. It also had the bad luck to come out the same year as a similarly titled Jim Jarmusch movie (probably the only instance in history where a Jarmusch film is the more mainstream option). But it’s a plucky little contender, sometimes missing the mark, but frequently doing more with its talent than one could reasonably expect. Like another delightfully insane musical on our list, this is a supremely self-assured production in spite of its own bizarre missteps. As fascism rears its ugly head once more, it’s time to pull Strangers in Paradise out of the deep freeze. It’s hour has come, and it’s got something to sing about.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by TC. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
Has EXISTO ever been nominated for review? That’s another anti-Fascist musical that needs to be discovered again.
Existo is in the reader-suggested queue.