All that Jazz by Bob Fosse

Life is one big show ! This is what the viewer learns whilst watching All that Jazz. Theatre producer Joe Gideon must create a musical comedy in order to put it on Broadway. Caught between a lack of inspiration and fear of failure, he launches himself body and soul into his work, neglecting everything else. His family life is a failure ; he cheats on his wife, doesn’t spend enough time with his daughter and takes on too many mistresses to handle. But this man who seems so far from happiness finally finds comfort when he learns that his lifestyle is going to end up killing him. The excesses of drugs and alcohol lead him to converse with death. This is when he starts to re-examine his life. A life which has been nothing but one big scene.

This film, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1980, today still appears to be a work which reaches into the heart of man’s timeless preoccupations. If the fear of death is omnipresent in the work of Bob Fosse, it is to be taken with a certain Epicurianism. What counts is in fact the present, and the happy moments in life. If the film reminds us with a certain humour that man is not God and that we all die in the end, Bob Fosse adds that the wake can be a big party, thus allowing us to celebrate the fall of the final curtain ! The director should have been aware, upon presenting his film in 1980, of the autobiographical character which he would later give to this work. Deceased in 1987 from work exhaustion, this illustrious director left behind a rich filmography as an everlasting and celebratory inheritance, taken up very recently by Rob Marshall with the excellent Chicago. “And the show must go on !”

Alexis Cathala