ABSTRACT
The Commitments is concerned with popular music and identity, with a younger generation using music to define itself. The film’s six-minute audition sequence used musical performances by young Dubliners who had themselves auditioned to appear in the film, reflecting the diversity of the city’s music scenes. However, none of the auditioners play 1960s soul. Youth culture, music scenes, and subcultures are as much bound up in the visuals of fashions as the sonic qualities of music. The costume designer Penny Rose made meticulous efforts to give the cast the right look, with costumes inspired by auditioners’ own clothes, rather than costuming each cast member according to stereotyped ideas of character and fashion. Despite the film’s bids to realism, it can also be understood as a type of backstage musical, with the songs performing a utopian function, as defined by Richard Dyer in relation to Hollywood musicals. Although the film captures the contemporary atmosphere of the city and its youth, by superimposing a 1960s soul sound, and by emphasising particularly retro clothing styles, it becomes a form of ‘retro’ film. Part of the appeal of The Commitments then is musical nostalgia, which the film’s distributor 20th Century Fox identified, noting that the film played better in test screenings with an older generation familiar with the songs.
