Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Sweet Charity
1969 · Bob Fosse · Sweet Charity on Sightlines
A row of women leans on a brass railing. Hip cocked, shoulder rolled in, one hand out in a come-on that died behind the eyes a long time ago. “Big Spender” barely travels. It poses, holds, snaps to the next pose. The camera climbs and the women flatten into a pattern; it drops close and takes a hip, a wrist, the brim of a bowler. That railing is where Bob Fosse's cinema begins, and it is where the American musical starts coming apart in a way worth watching.
The musical is the most confident genre the movies ever built. Someone wants something, sings it, and the singing changes the room. Deleuze called that passage the movement of world: the dancer's step leaves the body and the world picks it up, so a sidewalk becomes a stage and the weather cooperates. It is the movement-image at its happiest. Perception, then action, then a situation actually transformed.
Now put Charity Hope Valentine inside that engine. She is robbed and shoved into a lake by a man she loves. She is swept into a movie star's orbit and left alone in his apartment. She is trapped in an elevator with Oscar, who is too frightened of everything to stay. Each episode lifts her and drops her, and she arrives at the next one unchanged, still available to hope. Deleuze has a name for this condition, and it isn't an insult: the crisis of the action-image. The character perceives perfectly well. She simply cannot act in any way that alters what she perceives. The links between episodes go slack, causality thins, and the film becomes a stroll rather than a chain. Deleuze's word for that is the balade, the trip that transforms nothing.
He found this condition in Italian neorealism, which is exactly where Fosse found Charity. She is Cabiria, lifted out of Nights of Cabiria with the betrayals intact and the profession sanded down to taxi dancing, resolved on the same ambiguous smile through tears instead of a wedding. Bazin loved the neorealists for refusing to cut the world into meaning, for letting an event stay uninterpreted. Fosse imports the neorealist heroine and then does the opposite of Bazin to her. He chops her into pieces.
Which is the usual charge against the film. Overdirected. Gimmicky. A stage director drunk on the optical printer. The lens offers a better description: Fosse bolted a genre whose engine is transformation onto a protagonist who cannot transform anything, and the grinding people hear is two systems that don't fit. He didn't smooth it over. He amplified it.
Watch what the cutting does to space. Framings isolate a hip, a hand, a hat. Musical phrases break on hard cuts. Perspectives multiply inside a single beat. The ballroom stops being a place where dancing happens and becomes a handful of disconnected affective fragments, what Deleuze calls an any-space-whatever: space that no longer serves as a setting for action, only as a field of intensities. For a dance hall this isn't decoration. It's the truth of the business. Nobody at the Fandango buys a person. They buy a part, for the length of a ticket.
The hostesses on the railing aren't individuals either. They are what Deleuze calls a dividual, a group rendered as one affective unit, a single curdled quality with several bodies. “The Rich Man's Frug” does it colder: mod dancers moving with hypnotic, affectless precision while high angles press them into geometry. There the world does absorb the dance. Pattern wins. It just never happens for Charity. On the rooftop, wanting something better than this, she isn't taken up by anything. She gets cut.
Fosse's own invention is in the bodies. Turned-in knees, rolled shoulders, splayed fingers, hips isolated from everything above them, props treated as extensions of the limb: bowler, chair, rail. He codified it in “Steam Heat” in 1957, and Damn Yankees a year later gave it the angular, hip-cocked line that the Frug would refine into pure geometry. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that exposes the social relation a body is caught in a gest. That is exactly what a Fosse pose is. The come-on curdled into contempt is a transaction made visible in a shoulder. No lyric has to say it.
Then there's the stopping. Cinema's original trick, in Deleuze's Bergsonian account, was to sample movement at equidistant intervals, the any-instant-whatever, no instant more important than another, which is why it flows. Older arts had to choose the decisive pose. Fosse hauls the pose back in. He freezes at the peak of a movement, killing the motion to leave a figure hanging there. His choreography does the same thing without a lab, in what the record calls his erotic use of stillness: a movement art built out of arrests. The freeze-frames and jump cuts come off Breathless, and he grafts them onto “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” a woman alone in a rich man's rooms, giddy, narrating herself to friends who aren't there. The number stops being a staged event and becomes a mental space, the trick he took from 8½. Deleuze's onirosign, a dream circuit anchored to no memory at all. Look at the title again. If.
Then the endings. Fosse shot Fellini's, where Charity is abandoned again, and a kinder version was prepared too, and different prints have carried different ones. Deleuze's falsifying narration usually means incompatible versions held inside a single film. Here the incompatibility got distributed across the reels, a nervous studio's accident. It landed in the work anyway. The film exists in mutually exclusive states, and the card refuses to adjudicate: and she lived hopefully ever after. Hopefully carries the whole load. With hope, and let's hope. A musical ending is supposed to be a verdict. This one declines to issue one.
It flopped, and the flop is part of the meaning. A 70mm roadshow attraction with an overture and an intermission, carrying material that contradicted every promise the format made. Robbins had proved in West Side Story that dance could be choreographed and cut for the anamorphic frame rather than recorded from a proscenium; Fosse pushed that past its limit and found where the limit was, which is a service somebody had to perform. It nearly cost him a film career. Three years later he brought the same instruments under discipline in Cabaret, where every cut answers to the drama, and won the Oscar for it. The percussive dance sequence that breaks the phrase instead of riding it is ordinary now. It wasn't in 1969, and this is where it was tried at full scale.
So watch the railing again and ask who the camera is with. Is Charity's faith heroic, or is she the last person in the picture who hasn't noticed what the picture keeps showing us? Fosse shot both answers. And watch for the stops. Every time he freezes a dancer, ask what he wants you looking at instead of the dance.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — The episodic Fellini-derived structure in which Charity is robbed and pushed into a lake, swept into a movie star's orbit, trapped in an elevator with Oscar — each encounter raising and dashing hope, with Charity unchanged throughout, her optimism tested rather than transformed.
- voyage / balade form — The picaresque inherited from Nights of Cabiria: a series of weakly linked encounters that accumulate into no arc, ending on an ambiguous smile through tears rather than a wedding.
- any-space-whatever (disconnection) — Surtees's framings isolate a hip, a hand, a bowler hat, and Fosse's cutting breaks musical phrases with hard cuts and multiplies perspectives within a single beat, so the Fandango Ballroom registers as affective fragments rather than a space for action.
- dividual — “Big Spender” arrays the hostesses along the brass railing as a single unit of predatory languor with come-ons curdled into contempt; “The Rich Man's Frug” does the same coldly, its dancers moving with hypnotic, affectless precision.
- the gest — Fosse's signature vocabulary — turned-in knees, rolled shoulders, splayed jazz hands, angular hip isolations, props as body-extensions — codified in “Steam Heat” (The Pajama Game, 1957) and used in “Big Spender” to display the transaction the hostesses are caught in.
- privileged instants — Optical-printer freeze-frames that stop the image at the peak of a movement, plus the erotic use of stillness within the choreography itself — the posed, decisive form reinstalled inside a dance film.
- movement of world — In “The Rich Man's Frug,” high angles flatten the dancers into pattern and the movement passes into geometry; Charity, singing “There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This” on the rooftop, is never absorbed that way — the cutting intervenes instead.
- onirosign (dream-image) — “If My Friends Could See Me Now” — Charity alone in a movie star's apartment, given Breathless-derived jump cuts and freeze-frames — treats the number as mental space rather than staged event, the self-reflexive slippage between interior wish and observed reality taken from 8½.
- falsifying narration — Fosse shot a downbeat, Fellini-faithful ending in which Charity is abandoned and an alternate consoling version was also prepared; different release and broadcast prints carry different endings, and the film closes on “and she lived hopefully ever after.”