If you create a love scene in a film visually using the metaphor “When we first saw each other, time stood still”, you run the highest risk of producing kitsch. Especially when the scene is part of a musical film. It takes a Steven Spielberg to circumnavigate the danger. In his cinema version of the classic musical "West Side Story", the lovers Maria (Rachel Zegler) and Tony (Ansel Elgort) see each other at the crucial moment at opposite ends of the dance floor. Instead of time freezing or the other dancers around them disappearing in soft focus, as the 1961 film original solved the task of depicting the rapture together, Spielberg accelerates the pace of the swirling couples. Dancers pass by in a colorful rustle of ruffles,Light reflections blind the camera lens, so that one thinks that stars have fallen from the sky behind Maria and Tony. That, too, is very close to kitsch. The two new lovers, however, do not lapse into the rigidity of knickknacks, but slowly move towards each other through the hustle and bustle of parties, and you want to rewind briefly in the cinema to understand the mass choreography with which all the non-simultaneous sequences of movements were arranged.The mass choreography with which all the non-simultaneous sequences of movements were arranged.The mass choreography with which all the non-simultaneous sequences of movements were arranged.

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET.

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Spielberg knows that today's audiences can expect more speed than the viewers of the original film understood in the middle of the last century.

He uses the changed viewing habits to remove everything from the template that is unnecessary for narration.

By giving the characters as much space as possible, he even accepts to save on the music: five minutes of the overture, for example, which are played before the opening tracks in the first film, are omitted.

Instead, there are more backstories, even for the smallest supporting character.

The action still begins in New York's Upper West Side, but shows the rival gangs of the Puerto Rican Sharks and the White Jets against the backdrop of the gentrification of the neighborhood they both live in. The struggle of working-class children of different skin color for supremacy is characterized as meaningless from the start by a wrecking ball that takes up the entire picture in one of the first shots of the film. The fact that it takes place anyway is due to the nature of the subject matter of the story, borrowed from Shakespeare, of lovers who cannot expect happiness because it comes from warring families; Jerome Robbins, who came up with the idea for “West Side Story” in the late 1950s, was inspired by “Romeo and Juliet”. Spielberg is not the only one who takes his job so seriouslyas if he was actually filming Shakespeare, the actors do that too.

Rachel Zegler, who is in front of the camera for the first time in a feature film, puts on her Maria much more confidently than Natalie Wood dared sixty years ago.

Her Maria knows what she is getting into when she kisses Polish-born Tony right away at the first dance.

In a subordinate clause, she will make it clear to her big brother, the leader of the Sharks, that after he left Puerto Rico she has looked after her father for years, bears responsibility for her own life and does not need a protector.