Kritiken

Crucially, Midler's actual fans populate the concert scenes: According to the Paula Meija essay that accompanies Criterion's Blu-ray and DVD release of The Rose, the spectators for these performances, shot live at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles and Veterans Memorial Stadium in Long Beach, were Bathhouse Betty's most ardent admirers. And it is during these segments that the film's disregard for its time frame is most glaringly, and touchingly, obvious.

Situated cinematically somewhere between concert documentary and filmed rock opera, The Rose plays out as nothing so much as Greek tragedy on a rock-and-roll stage, with Rose as the classic tragic hero whose terrible fate hangs over her from the movie's opening moments. She will be brought down by a deeply familiar yet distinctly modern cocktail of malignancy: delusions of grandeur and the creeping depredations of addiction.

It's too busy lamenting the consequences of myth to realize that its fetishizing of suffering as part of the artistic process only furthers the myth. Although the film opens with a handful of reporters barging into Rose's childhood home, seeking answers to why her career came to such an abrupt end, the filmmakers display little interest in deconstructing or interrogating the cult surrounding feminine pursuits of stardom.

It's a cruel, bathetic film, with no interest in its period (the 60s) or milieu, and no real sympathy for its main character, who is used, almost pornographically, as a body to be degraded. Director Mark Rydell elicits remarkably little emotion from his highly emotional situation; he seems more concerned with the suffering than with the sufferer, and his clinical detachment kills the feeling.