Tallulah, we don’t know where we’re going
'Bugsy Malone' Film 1976 - Tallulah, as played by Jodie Foster,
(ITV/Shutterstock, GTV ARCHIVE)
Alan Parker’s 1976 film ‘Bugsy Malone’ is a prohibition-era gangster musical with a cast made up of children. It’s a spoof, so the gangsters’ guns shoot cream instead of bullets. Gangster-kid Fat Sam runs a speakeasy behind a bookshop where other gangster kids come to sing, drink and fancy. Gangster-kid Bugsy Malone is a penniless ex-boxer who’s a ‘little too popular with the broads but a nice guy’. He gives new-comer singer, Blousey, some love interest. Tallulah is Fat Sam’s moll, the speakeasy’s chanteuse as well as Bugsy’s old flame. Jodie Foster was thirteen when she played the role.
Rosa revisits Bugsy Malone as a finalist; the film is poignant now more than ever.
When I was ten, young Jodie Foster’s Tallulah had magnetic hold over me. I wanted to be called Tallulah, I loved the rolls of the Ls in her name. I wanted to drape myself the way she does, creamy in her silk and kiss curls, hips tilting against the wall in that circle of light on the stairs. I wanted the gap between her teeth, her flat, low turned eyes and lazy gaze, her smokiness, her drawl and her walk, her loose arms, her worldliness and her languid, liquid allure. She was everything there was to be. I remember at my eleventh birthday party, lining the boys up in front of the tv, making them watch that scene when Jodie Foster sings my name is Tallulah, I live till I die. I think I hoped they’d understand something I didn’t, that they’d help clarify something. Or perhaps I wanted them to fall in love with her as I had, and felt somehow that being the one to share Tallulah would bring me closer to her.
Watching the film again, more than ten years later, huddled with my flatmates round our tiny tv in our freezing living room, I’m astonished to find Tallulah just as mesmerising; Bugsy and Blousey too. But this time, the unnatural stilts in the child-actors’ voices are obvious, as is the sweet devotion with which they imitate adult intonation of lines they probably only half understood, lines about broads and rent collectors. The gangster-boys’ scrawniness and smooth cheeks are absurdly apparent; and the vulnerability of the girls’ glistering womanhoods is tender and terrifying. It’s difficult to believe that once, these kids seemed as fully-formed and adult as it was possible to be. But our grown-up unease with kids playing adults cannot disturb the mighty magic of let’s-pretend. It’s a magic that makes fears and desires feel electrifyingly huge, and turns everything known into thick and smoky unknown.
Strange and out-of-place on children’s faces and in children’s voices, the elusive unknownness of adulthood that we knew as children, is restored. The quasi-maturity of Bugsy’s perfectly-formed ‘man weak at the knees’ expression as he watches Blousey open her mouth and sing in her blue velvet voice, I’m feeling fine, filled with emotions, stronger than wine, they give me the notion, that this strange new feeling, Is something that you’re feeling too-oo-o, is terrible and thrilling. Tallulah sits by Bugsy as he watches Blousey. She lowers her eyes, with breathtakingly delicate precision, to communicate in adult language her pride and her protective devotion to Bugsy. How exciting, to understand for the first time, these glances and gazes, to watch them flit and dart. That strange new feeling Blousey - what’s that feeling, where’d it come from, where’d you hear about it, what do you do with it, what will it do to us? All that tumbling fear and thirst, makes us (my flatmates and me) little children again, watching wide-eyed and shyly in love with a world of sex, rent and rejection, that lies misty and far-off on some horizon.
I read online that the singing in the film is exclusively lip-synced, so the voices you hear in the songs aren’t actually the kids’. That makes it, somehow, all the more absurd and, also, all the more tender. It’s like grown-ups playing make-believe with kid-dolls, ‘doing the voices’, instead of the other way round. There’s something deeply delightful and fragile about grown-ups playing let’s-pretend. It’s poignant now more than ever, as our cohort are about to don our grown-up job costumes and talk in grown-up language about grown-up things about which we’re about to worry. Feeling like wide-eyed kids watching adults playing kids playing adults is a beautifully, soothingly silly antidote to the whole grown-up game.
At the end of the film, all the cast sing together, covered in cream, we could have been anything that we wanted to be and it’s not too late to change. I like that; nothing’s set. Now that we’re about to graduate, we’ve stopped asking each other ‘what do you want to do when you grow-up?'. Instead, we ask, rather tentatively, what do you want to do…after…? And then we trail off, unable to say after what, as though there’s some bleak, solid, end-able thing we’re afraid of naming. I don’t want to ever stop asking each other what we want to do, because I don’t want ever to have done it, whatever it is. I want the freedom of not knowing to last forever; I think it can and I think that’s what Tallulah really means when she sings: I live till I die, I don’t say where I’m going, Or where I’m coming from.