As much as I hate to pigeonhole an artist, especially on the basis of just two works, I can’t say I’d predict that Act of Killing and Look of Silence director Joshua Oppenheimer wishes to create a musical combining the writings of Samuel Beckett and stylings of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. And yet, when speaking to Screen Daily, he revealed an intention to give the playwright’s Happy Days — which concerns “a middle-aged married woman buried up to her neck in sand and recalling happier times in her life” — just such a treatment, having found song-and-dance numbers to be “a form of cinema that is honest about its own sentimentality.” Put in that light, it makes perfect sense: spend enough time chronicling genocide and you’ll probably need a lift, too.
I, for one, will be curious to see how the man fulfills a promise of innovating the musical, though we won’t see that (or the other narrative feature he’s developing) right away. What comes next is another documentary, one “firmly under wraps” on account of Oppenheimer’s hope to avoid any chance that the participants, in his own words, “hear me misquoted or quoted out of context describing the journey we’re taking together.” (This fame is the sort of thing that can emerge after you create two acclaimed, awards-fêted works.) With the project having been in development for roughly a year, however, one expects and hopes it won’t be long before more emerges.