All That Jazz

A choreographer rehearsing a Broadway musical and cutting a film at the same time gets through his days on pills and cigarettes. Every morning he says the same line to the mirror: it's showtime. The film does not make him likeable; the narrative announces the collapse in advance and stages death as a character, a woman he talks to. In the closing section open heart surgery is intercut with a staged musical number. Bob Fosse wrote and directed it from his own life, having had a similar operation a few years earlier. It shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes and won four Academy Awards. A real warning: real surgical footage is used, and the closing sequence is long and hard to watch.