Kehta hai Joker, saara zamana...

A still from Joker: Folie à Deux, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga

Something tells me the first time the penny must've dropped for director Todd Phillips to feature Lady Gaga in a musical was watching rushes, or final cut, of Bradley Cooper's A Star Is Born (2018).

Wherein Lady Gaga makes a ‘Tiger Woodsian' debut as a natural-born film star, adding so much to her onscreen persona, with that popstar voice. Nobody knew, until then, Gaga could act. The world went gaga after.

A Star Is Born, being among the most suitable scripts for Bollywood, unsurprisingly remade at least twice in Hindi (Abhimaan; Aashiqui 2).

Phillips co-produced the Cooper-Gaga super-starrer, for Warner Bros, exactly a year before he released The Joker (2019), for the same studio.

During promotional interviews of the latter, if I recall right, writer-director-producer Phillips was clear, there would be no sequel to Joker. That is, Joker: Folie à Deux (2024), in theatres, starring Joaquin Phoenix, with Gaga, as a musical.

Centred altogether still, on the attention-seeking, abused, eponymous protagonist, aka Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) - pleading split personality, in a court of law, for murders committed, in full public view, in the film's first part.

You walk in for Phoenix, and step out, having experienced nothing else. A great performance, captured with the camera making love to the actor's every twitch/move, is still a good reason to go.

What kinda musical, or "not exactly a musical" (Gaga), is Joker: Folie à Deux? In that first moment, when hero-heroine, in prison, step into a dream world, breaking into an item song, I figured - this is, for lack of a better definition, a traditional, Bollywood/desi musical!

Which isn't to suggest the ‘dream sequence' as a liminal space is an Indian invention. So then? Well, the fact that songs, unlike with western musicals, mostly exist for songs' sake, alone.

As interludes. Rather than taking story/character forward. The leads, and none else, sing - threatening running time, because? They feel like it! Only the outcomes attempted are vastly different, if not the opposite.

In a Bollywood picture/musical, so to say, songs would free the spirited leads, in love, from unnecessary rigours of realism - heightening emotions, enlivening audience's mood...

That's something Gaga does in her eighth studio album, Harlequin, to coincide with Joker 2's release, that I've listened on loop since.

As Harley Quinn in the film, she intentionally sings sub-par for a global stage sensation. As does Phoenix, for that matter, who could so convincingly croon in a deep baritone, in the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line (2005).

Together, they make uninspiring music to deliberately render the movie dreary, instead! You feel pulled away from the big screen.

What's the point, then? Naah, never gotta meet Phillips to ask him this. Well, I have met him once, off Bangkok, on sets of Hangover 3 (2013). The 2009, hilarious Hangover was the highest grossing R-rated comedy, ever.

Third part, it appeared to me, was made to boost Thai tourism, with my friends then booking ‘Hangover suite' in Bangkok, for their bachelors' party, when there was none such in the actual movie!

What struck me about Joker, first, is how Phillips - from Hangover, Old School, Starsky & Hutch, etc - arrived at the dark, dystopian Phoenix masterpiece, that had engaged and disturbed commentators enough to anticipate copy-cat crimes among its potential viewers!

Hints for homage/inspiration were as much there in the movie itself (Martin Scorsese's muse, Robert De Niro, in a three/four-scene role), as in Phillips's own, unknown films, from his early career. The filmic family tree, as I saw it, goes thus.

Phillips's disturbing documentaries, Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies (1993, YouTube) --> Frathouse (1998, YouTube) --> Joker (2009) <-- Scorsese's The King Of Comedy (1983) <-- Taxi Driver (1976).

Try burning through this movie syllabus, back-to-back, as I did then, without wanting to slit your wrist after!

Collecting over $1 billion, Venice's Golden Lion winner, Joker, likewise, remains one of the highest grossing R-rated movies in history. What about its sequel?

Folie à Deux, in French, literally means madness of two. In the sense of how insanity, like humour, is contagious. Except, you barely get to Gaga, the second of the two.

Does society itself respond to a deranged man's delusion, with extreme adulation, or mass hysteria, because they can't tell better? Yes. And that's the external life of Joker.

How does Phillips arrive at Folie à Deux?

By subverting every audience expectation from Joker's sequel - with a musical, that's not a musical; a romance, that's not romance; a film from comic book universe, chiefly set between two indoor locations (jail, courthouse); Gotham City, that's just New York City; and even Joker, who's actually not Joker!
How does Warner, that spent $200 million (much of it, surely, on Phoenix and Gaga), respond to the sequel?

By throwing open ticket-windows a month in advance, bringing forward its India release-date to a Wednesday (national holiday, Oct 2); plastering hoardings across London, I noticed, for its Oct 5, bumper-opener… Priming up global mainstream audiences, for blockbuster max!

What separates flamboyant Joker, and the understated Folie à Deux, is primarily the pandemic. We've collectively travelled through darkness.

Sitting in a half empty hall, on its first weekend, something tells me, Phoenix might rise from the ashes on the OTT, if at all.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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