Sunset Boulevard is a tale of fractured glory with Homeric dimensions. The movie presents Hollywood as a never-ending Trojan War that attracts fresh generations of dreamy youths in search of conquest and treasure. The lead characters have retired from battle, wounded. Joe Gillis, like Odysseus, is a vagrant warrior ensnared in the island-mansion of Norma Desmond, who plays the role of broken-queen-turned-sorceress. These fabulous elements are preserved in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version. So is the Norma-Joe affair, with its distasteful emotional template: mother-son, boss-slave, mistress-poodle, crone-toyboy. The lovers are linked by nothing but neediness and failure, and each desires the mirage that the other represents. In all, it makes for a dark, unsettling and perfectly humourless story that inexplicably seizes the imagination. Put it this way, I didn’t enjoy it but I couldn’t help loving it.
Visually this production is immaculate. A huge orchestra, seated on stage, is partially concealed beneath a network of intersecting staircases that doubles as the movie lot and as Norma’s sprawling home.
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