This song is about time.

Right at the beginning of the lockdown, having missed the start of the National Theatre’s livestream launch of One Man, Two Guvnors, a friend and I decided to watch Groundhog Day (1993) in tandem in our respective flats instead. Nat King Cole’s sparkling version of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s ‘Almost Like Being In Love’ brings the film to a close.

Lerner and Loewe wrote their by now much-recorded classic for the musical Brigadoon (1947), which received its pre-Broadway premiere on Groundhog Day that year. Over and above its lyrical aptness, was this choice a deliberate reference on the part of Groundhog Day‘s director Harold Ramis to the musical’s stage history? Encouraged by music editor Sally Boldt, Ramis resisted studio bosses’ demands for something poppier and more contemporary for the final moments of his film. Three months later, similarly distantly ensconced, we watched Vincente Minnelli’s film dramatisation of Brigadoon (1954). The song and this moment of calendrical serendipity only hint at the extent of what they share.

The golden thread that ties them together is their use of the single day as a narrative device. In Brigadoon, while lost with companion Jeff (Van Johnson) on a hunting trip in Scotland, jaded Tommy Albright (Gene Kelly) encounters the love of his life. Fiona Campbell (Cyd Charisse) is the denizen of an enchanted eighteenth century village that can reveal itself from the mist only once every one hundred years. Meanwhile, until he finds meaningful self-love, Groundhog Day‘s sardonic weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is condemned to repeatedly relive February 2 in the small town of Punxsutawney, whose annual groundhog ritual predicts the timeliness of spring.

‘Almost Like Being In Love’, Brigadoon‘s “only un-Scottish number”, places both punctuality and uncertainty at the heart of the experience of love. The full lyrics present a verse about the invigorating qualities of the Scottish Highlands and include the voice of the character Fiona, but the choruses, the basis of the majority of recordings, focus blissfully and more generally on the relationship between love and time’s markings.

What a day this has been! What a rare mood I’m in!
Why, it’s almost like being in love!
There’s a smile on my face for the whole human race!
Why, it’s almost like being in love!
All the music of life seems to be like a bell that is ringing for me!
And from the way that I feel when that bell starts to peal,
I could swear I was falling, I would swear I was falling,
It’s almost like being in love.

The present is of necessity constantly on the move. Likewise, the euphoria of love, which makes the person experiencing it a witness to their own self. These amazing lyrics achieve the perfect paradox of capturing the uncapturable – which may be why the final additional line of Frank Sinatra’s 1947 recording for Columbia (“In fact I have fallen in love”) feels so crashingly disappointing. (His infinitely livelier 1961 recording for Capitol, arranged by Billy May, doesn’t do this.)*

But what about the choice to characterise the music of life, which I understand to mean the divine energies that manifest as joy, as the sound of a bell ringing? With this phrase, modern timekeeping and the inevitability of wedlock threaten the song’s magical inbetweenness – reminiscent of the later lyric “get me to the church on time”, immortalised in My Fair Lady’s ‘I’m Getting Married in the Morning’ (1956), another famous Lerner and Loewe composition featuring bells.

Whatever. It’s hard to unthink these things, but to be honest I would rather focus on the song’s evocation of love as generous call and response, and music as sonorous vibration.

Still, both of these films are absolutely concerned with modernity – from the cultural and historical contrasts in Brigadoon between the villagers and their visitors Tommy and Jeff, and the screeching return of the two to a frenetic New York where Tommy’s fiancee (doppelganger of Fiona)** awaits, to Phil’s profession in Groundhog Day, which combines meterological prediction and small time celebrity and its discontents.

And the events that unfold in both rest on what modernity excludes. Magic isn’t supposed to happen in situations in which aeroplanes and cars are part of everyday life, and time marches forward relentlessly. Magic pauses that forward march, allowing different realities to emerge – the chance meeting of lovers from different historical times, a sequence of time that is endlessly replayed and reworked.

In this respect, these stories are both deeply theatrical too. Not unlike the weather forecast blue screen, Phil’s progress through the multiple reiterations of February 2 makes of Punxsutawney and its characters an ersatz stage setting for his cursed existential self-improvement – especially Rita (Andie MacDowell), the object of his desire, whose own kind self beneficently “makes him need himself”. Meanwhile, given the mystical threshold time of Brigadoon, Tommy struggles to take the reality of the feelings he and Fiona share seriously. As Serge Cardinal proposes in a wonderful discussion of the relation between temporality, music and image in Minnelli’s film, “music teaches him how to couple, to dance, in the deepest sense, with someone”.

When it appears at the end of Groundhog Day, ‘It’s Almost Like Being In Love’ sounds a bittersweet note. Phil knows Rita inside and out, but she, on a different temporal trajectory, hardly knows him at all. Not awesome in many respects.** But it’s also fitting that title lyric should become a hypothesis to be tested in a future that we won’t see. Set apart from the films’ narratives, the song expresses the radical uncertainty of all love as it begins. Worlds take on the character of contingency. These films literalise it. I said all this to my friend as we did post-match WhatsApp-ing about Brigadoon, and added that ‘almost like’ is just the maddest combination of words imaginable. “Which involves absolute risk”, he replied. “And all it is is… what you already hold, and is yours already.” So right. The beauty that lives in these films is how their protagonists move beyond fearful provisionality towards love for another, for themselves.

 

*Few recordings of ‘Almost Like Being In Love’ are as charming as Nat King Cole’s imo, but I really enjoy those by Beverley Kenny, Sallie Blair (“won’t you smoke the mood I’m in”), Chris Connor, Della Reese, Nancy Wilson, Etta Jones and Johnny Hartman. Michael Johnson’s takes the song in a unique direction.

**One million percent these are not feminist films. At all. Cf. the founding mythology of Brigadoon being flight from witches (Jeff: “Oh we have ’em. We pronounce it differently”), framing of almost every female bit part in Groundhog Day, etc etc.