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 In cinemas Thursday [PG]
Director: Stephen Walker
Runtime: 107mins
It’s not hard to imagine what went through the mind of director Stephen Walker after his first few meetings with the Young@Heart choir and its director, Bob Cilman. Here was a group of talented singers whose average age was in the high eighties, and who have travelled extensively in the United States and Europe, taking their own special interpretation of contemporary music to adoring audiences – in terms of documentary fodder, this group would have been absolute gold. Walker and his crew were given permission to make several trips to the US to record the group’s preparation for an upcoming concert; what eventuated is fascinating, uplifting and tragic.
Chorus director Bob Cilman formed the group in the mid-eighties on the basis of its participants’ love for golden oldies, and they quickly formed a reputation as a solid gold act, touring to local retirement homes and eventually more mainstream audiences. Cilman soon decided that the singers could expand their repertoire to include contemporary songs, and the Young@Heart song-list came to include music from the likes of David Bowie, Radiohead and Sonic Youth, amongst others.
Of course, any group with such a high average age is bound to fluctuate through infirmity and death, and the challenges facing Cilman and his dedicated singers is immediately apparent – part of the morbid tension underlying this sensitive documentary is the question of who is going to bow out before the big night. In the light of his ruthless direction and barely masked frustration at his subjects’ inability to master lyrics and rhythm – a running joke throughout the doco involves the group conquering songs like James Brown’s I Feel Good, The Pointer Sisters’ Yes We Can Can, and Sonic Youth’s Schizophrenia – Cilman quickly takes on a very sympathetic light as we realise how many singers he has farewelled over the last three decades.
One particularly poignant story thread involves two retired singers returning for a performance of Coldplay’s Fix You – while not all goes according to plan for the choir, the concert at the end of the film will leave few dry eyes. This is a delightful story about the timelessness of our love for music, and some of its best scenes feature geriatric music videos of some remarkable songs – I especially enjoyed I Wanna Be Sedated (The Ramones), Road to Nowhere (Talking Heads) and Staying Alive (The Bee Gees).
****
TIM MILFULL
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