Go back and watch Sia’s “Candelabro” music video if you haven’t seen it in a while. The Australian singer-songwriter’s hit about using the word “party” as a verb to feel momentarily free (“One two three / One two three / Drinking”), followed by the fall the next day (“Here comes the shame, there shame comes ”), it’s a complicated melody if you know her story. The clip, however, is simple, in fact: Maddie Ziegler, 11, dances in a vacant apartment. That’s it, but it’s much. She is wearing a blonde wig, similar to the two-tone, that obscures her face, which Sia started wearing in the presentations. The child kicks his legs, moves his arms, throws himself, widens his eyes, peeks through the curtains. Ziegler runs around the room and down a corridor, a tiny dervish in a leotard, making an infinite bow to infinity with a slightly unnerving smile on his face. The concept has nothing to do with the content of the song, but somehow it seems perfectly attuned to its sensation. At the time of writing, the video had over two billion views on YouTube. Given how instantly iconic it was, and how attractive and infinitely foldable it still is, this seems to be a smaller number than you’d expect.
Co-directed by Sia, “Chandelier” was the first time she worked with Ziegler. The teenager quickly became a kind of substitute for the musician – the face of an artist who preferred to hide his own. Ziegler danced on stage and at awards with Sia, interpreting his music through movement and acting as a counterpart to the screens. They made more music videos together, all memorable, almost all great. Eat as much as you can now (although “Elastic Heart” is a little difficult considering who Ziegler’s co-star is).
If you only have time for one, go straight to “Thunderclouds”. It’s from Sia’s LSD side project / supergroup – L is from Labrinth, D is from Diplo – and features Ziegler in both Tank Girl cosplay and swinging a big bright blue bow, plus a stylistic touch that she borrowed from her pop music partner in crime. Sia herself appears through a puppet replacement. Labrinth walks on a cloud. Diplo, once again radiating a just-sordid strong David-Spade vibe, drives an ornate van across a daytime sky. There is a lightning storm at 36,000 feet, which does not prevent Ziegler from dancing on top of Diplo’s flying Mystery Machine. Nothing could prevent Ziegler from dancing in a Sia video.
Now, imagine that the singer and dancer have made a series of other colorful videos very similar to that of “Thunderclouds”, with pieces of their other collaborations spread out. And they connected them through a story of a non-verbal autistic young woman who sees the world as a daydream of pastel dancing, a part by Busby Berkeley, a part in the Daft Punk clip “Around the World” and a part Yo Gabba Gabba. Occasionally Kate Hudson and Leslie Odom Jr. show up to join the fun.
Yes, that was our reaction too. With luck, you also lifted your chin off the floor.
You have to admire any attempt by an artist to broaden your horizons, try something new, swing with such dedication and passion for fences. But Song, The debut in the direction of Sia is the kind of curiosity in which the gap between your intentions and the end result is Grand Canyon style. Controversial from the start due to her decision to cast a neurotypical actor in the lead role, this mix of bold and urban drama and fantastic and outrageous musical sequences has been a labor of love for the singer – an attempt to translate the sensitivity displayed in her blunt lyrics of empowerment, his mastery of intimate but epic pop-bombastic, and his video collaborations on something bigger. Instead, it is a serious error that can be recognized as an extension of a voice, but it hits all the wrong notes. It doesn’t leave you with a vision of what someone was thinking, but asking yourself, “What the hell were they thinking?”
Music, we should note, is also the name of Ziegler’s character, who filters an overwhelming world through his headphones. Her grandmother (Mary Kay Place), along with a network of neighborhood people, keeps an eye on the music as she goes from the downtown apartment to the newspaper kiosk, to the street vendor to the library. Meanwhile, his older sister, Kazu (Hudson) – Zu for short – has kind of gone through a drug rehab period and is looking for a place to sleep. Some new customers, for their continued side agitation, selling pills would also be good.
In other words, it is still a mess: immature, impenitent, stuck in the addict-survivor way of seeing everything as a potential theft or a score. Not the kind of person who could take care of a brother with special needs, and yet circumstances force him to assume the role of chief musician. Fortunately, she has the help of Ebo (Odom Jr.), an immigrant who was once a local boxing champion and now runs a gym for underage boxers. And she is aided, in her own way, by Music’s vibrant inner life, which takes the form of those brilliant musical numbers in which she allows Ebo, and eventually Zu, in her private world.
These numbers are, unsurprisingly, the moments when you see the person who wrote “Titanium” and “Cheap Thrills” – who sang “I am small and needy / Wake me up and breathe”, who looked at a black and white giant. .. white wig and saw an alternative identity – shine. Marked by Sia and featuring Hudson and Odom sharing some of the vocal functions, they remember why their music is so pure a rush, and how the lyrics of something like “Insecure” play against the groove rise. This number unfolds against a purple background, with Hudson and Ziegler clapping hands as they exchange cartoon smiles. Others, like a version of “Music” that takes place in a standardized wonderland and involves the aspiring reclusive dancer from Beto Calvillo riding a bicycle, are small conceptual miracles. (Tracy Dishman’s production design stands out especially here.) The “Together” hoedown climax is an explosion in a rainbow factory. Out of context, these pieces can appear bold, inventive, stimulating. All things are a great four-minute vision and sound clip, in other words, and what makes a video clip not an advertisement, but an art.
But they are in fact handcuffed to a narrative, which turns their heroine into a kind of neurodivergent equivalent of a black magician, and therein lies the tragedy. There are representation issues at play here, and if you understand the bond between Sia and Ziegler, you can understand why the former wanted the latter for the role. This was another project together, another way to further develop a fertile creative relationship. It probably didn’t even occur to Sia to escalate anyone from that community. Whether the musician-filmmaker had cast an autistic artist to play music or not, that artist would still have to navigate the film that she and her co-writer, Dallas Clayton, had designed, however. Ziegler herself seems to treat the disease as an extension of her dance, so that her physical tics and facial expressions look like a choreographed physical mimicry, rather than a characteristic of autism or a person. It is an abstract interpretation of autism, a routine among many. Watching the scenes where she interacts with her co-stars orbiting the non-fantasy world, you find yourself praying that you will be cut out for a musical number soon, please, any second.
(As for the legitimately evoked scenes of Music being physically contained, in which Odom and Hudson “crush [her] with their love ”while she goes crazy, Sia apologized and promised to remove them on the day Song was nominated for several Golden Globes – one of the most questionable calls on this year’s list of nominees, although not yet among the top 1,000 mistakes that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association made in conjunction with the awards ceremony. The damage, however, was done.)
Song it is, at best, a delivery vehicle for a batch of songs and a series of isolated OMG shows, which give you the briefest glimpse of a pop songwriter’s desire to make a statement about “finding your voice and raise your own family. At worst, it is a permanent inducing brand against its creators, a simplistic fable by Holy Fool about anabolic steroids and a high sugar content in Skittles. There will be a few licks on the wounds, you expect, and a regroup, and lessons learned for Sia. I hope this doesn’t stop what has been a stellar career or the work of a genuinely exciting creative duo. All we can do is nod, move on, understand the need to improve and click on that “Candelabra” video again. Ninety minutes watching that video, and that song can get Song erased from our memory.