Programme Notes: Cabaret

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Programme Notes: Cabaret

Please note: these programme notes contain descriptions of plot and characters and are best read after watching the film.

Often described as a musical for people who don’t like musicals and hailed by some as one of the queerest academy winners of all time, Cabaret straddles worlds and defies categorisation. It is a period piece, a romantic melodrama, a historical snapshot and a musical. Its queer themes are also complex, with the bisexual lead character of Brian, and the gloriously androgynous, queer-coded Master of Ceremonies who acts as a kind of one-person Greek chorus. While sometimes straying into veiled ambiguity, the film also manages to celebrate nuanced sexuality and gender identities as a challenge to the dogmatic ideology of fascism.

Directed by Bob Fosse, Cabaret is based on Christopher Isherwoods’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel that depicts the crumbling world of 1930s Berlin and the rise of national socialism. The story went through two adaptations, as a play and then a stage musical, before making it to the big screen. Naturally, some of the harsh realities of Isherwood’s novel are lost in the flashy theatricality of the on-screen musical. However, the film deftly walks the line between pure entertainment, and something altogether darker. The screenplay went through multiple revisions and Fosse hired Hugh Wheeler, a friend of Isherwood, as a ‘research consultant’ to ensure the adaptation was more faithful to Isherwood’s text than the stage play, crucially resulting in Isherwood’s self-insert character Brian, who was made straight for the stage play, being written as bisexual for the film.

The narrative follows Brian, who is an outsider to Berlin, navigating the city’s nightlife, lowlife, and sociopolitical upheaval. On arriving in the city, he immediately befriends Sally, a creature of ‘divine decadence’ who takes him to the titular cabaret, where she’s a singer. Liza Minnelli plays Sally with irresistible charm; at once laughable and tragic, chillingly self-involved and insanely entertaining. Brian and Sally embark on an unlikely love affair and for a while seem to glide through the declining seediness of Weimar Berlin. Unlike in the novel which depicts the reality of a country in dire economic straits, the pair are poor but live a life of glamorous excess. They engage with a cast of misfit characters, including the ludicrously rich, bisexual and eminently moustached Maximilian von Heune who seduces them both before abruptly escaping the city.

Queerness is found everywhere in this film, not just in Brian’s relationships with Sally and Max, but also in the cabaret itself as an overtly queer space, and through other ‘forbidden’ relationships like that of the wealthy Jewish heiress Natalia Landauer and Fritz Wendel the penniless ‘gigolo’. This subplot uses a heterosexual relationship to explore how socio-political pressure can damage personal joys. As the Master of Ceremonies puts it: ‘Is it a crime to fall in love? Can we ever truly choose where the heart leads us?’. A question that in 1972, only five years after homosexuality was legalised in the UK and three years after the Stonewall riots, was extremely pertinent for the queer community.

The film has often been lauded for its nuanced portrayal of bisexuality, considered groundbreaking for its time. Throughout the film we see Brian’s joy in his own queerness grow, along with his knowledge of what it means to be queer in 1930s Germany. He tells Sally that he ‘doesn’t sleep with girls’ before recognising his attraction to her, then embarks on a romantic relationship with Max, moving between sexual identities with fluidity. The refreshingly understated acceptance of Brian’s queerness brings to mind Isherwood’s line in the original novel, ‘Eventually we’re all queer…’

Notably, Isherwood himself was unhappy with this depiction, writing that ‘Brian's homosexual tendency is treated as an indecent but comic weakness to be snickered at, like bed wetting’. In the original text, Brian’s character has an entirely platonic relationship with Sally, and is an openly gay man. The film confines Brian’s relationship with Max to off-screen experiences, and seems to celebrate his more heteronormative relationship with Sally. Max too, fits a negative stereotype of the seductive, hedonistic and amoral bisexual. For Isherwood, who had romantic relationships exclusively with men, this depiction may have felt like censorship of his text, and by extension, his life.

One of the most striking aspects of the film is its use of contrasting environments to show how the freedom of the cabaret is at odds with the tightening of broader German society and the rise of fascist ideals. The cabaret is a queer space, welcoming everyone and celebrating sexual liberation – though there is a notable exception in the treatment of a performer who is occasionally the butt of transphobic jokes; one way in which the film has aged poorly. As the situation outside the doors of the cabaret become increasingly dire, the stage performances grow more extreme. These contrasts are shown most starkly when performances are edited in with scenes of street violence. The cabaret is relatively safe for its queer proprietors, as long as they don’t look around them too carefully at the encroaching Nazi officers in the audience.

This dichotomy is never more clearly presented than in a rural Bavarian beer hall where Max and Brian are forced to listen (with great distaste) to a young Nazi sing the appropriately titled ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ as Sally sleeps in the car. They leave the bar together quietly, Brian uncomfortable and Max with a shrug of the shoulders. With the benefit of historical knowledge, the audience might regard their indifference with pity and disgust, but the darkest truth of this film lies in its depiction of their implied impotence. Brian’s attempt at challenging the national socialists head on simply results in multiple injuries and a period of bed rest. When the MC desperately tells the audience towards the end of the film, ‘We have no troubles here…’, we cannot believe them.

I’d like to be able to write that Cabaret is a piece of historical fiction with no relevance to our current political climate, but in fact its enduring appeal is based in its continued pertinence. To have a marginalised identity is to be particularly vulnerable to the whims of broader political and social changes, and this film shows with remarkable humanity how its characters navigate personal difficulties against the backdrop of historical tragedies. The film asks us how safe we can keep ourselves and our communities, and reminds us that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. As a queer person, I read this film as a cautionary tale and a reminder to defend our spaces and our rights, but I also enjoy the bawdiness and fun, the gorgeous costumes and unreasonably catchy songs. This film, like our community, contains multitudes.

Rosa Cato, film & culture writer

11 June 2024

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