Is Lady Gaga a real actress, or just a singer who sometimes acts?

After A Star Is Born and House of Gucci, Gaga stars in Joker: Folie à deux. It remains to be seen whether cinema is a real job for her or a simple distraction.

Music stars who have moved on to cinema have always been classified into two categories. There are those who succeed in their professional transition and begin a real second career, carrying out both activities – Barbra Streisand, Mark Wahlberg, Frank Sinatra or Kris Kristofferson. Then those giving the impression of doing this without paying too much attention, to stretch their legs between two albums – like Mick Jagger or Rihanna.

Where to classify Lady Gaga? We have been asking the question since A Star Is Bornan irresistible pop melodrama which marked the birth of a super actress. Before that, Gaga in the cinema (and on TV), it was first small roles with Robert Rodriguez (Machete Kills And Sin City: I killed for her) and in the Ryan Murphy series American Horror Story (the seasons Hotel And Roanoke), where the “Mother Monster” had mainly been invited to bring with her luggage her mutant and noisy aesthetic, which blended perfectly into the glam-horror worlds of Murphy or comic book worlds of Rodriguez.

A Star Is Borndrop the mask

Everything really changed in 2018, so, with A Star Is Borna pivotal film where Lady Gaga dropped the mask – and the makeup, in an emblematic scene, where her partner and director Bradley Cooper watched (filmed) her removing her makeup, leaving the stage, in the dressing rooms of a cabaret transformist. It was Gaga stripped bare, suddenly natural, whereas for a long time she had only defined herself by her taste for disguise and simulacrum. The film, in addition to being a sort of self-portrait for her (the story of a cheeky Italian-American woman transformed into a current consumer product for the needs of the music industry), thus functioned as a real baptism of actress, the beginning of a second career, even in its programmatic title, “a star is born”.

House of Guccia pure Gaga-movie

Of course, if Gaga was no longer wearing makeup in A Star Is Bornshe nevertheless came with songs (including the fabulous “Shallow”), as if to justify an entire film being built around her. The issue of the following film, House of Gucci (Ridley Scott, 2021) was to film the colorful diva without music to support her. Playing Patrizia Reggiani, the woman who ordered the murder of her husband Maurizio Gucci in the 90s (and who the press nicknamed Lady Gucci), Lady Gaga found a little Ryan Murphy flavor (more American Crime Story that Horror Story for once) and compensated for the absence of music with his wardrobe, which extended his own universe onto the screen fashion overexcited, all in eccentric clothes, brash poses and unapologetic bad taste.

Was this for Gaga a way of asserting that the roles they would play in the cinema would only be extensions of her musical “character”? The Italian accent with which she spoke in the film, as well as her delirious Actors Studio method (she apparently remained in character for months), was a paradoxical way of disappearing into the role while asserting that we were in a pure Gaga-movie.

The actors of House of Gucci have been widely mocked for their histrionic performances (especially Jared Leto, buried under tons of prosthetics) but, from a strictly theoretical point of view, this film about fakes and counterfeiting (the Gucci empire falters when imitations made in China come to compete with the luxurious leather bags of the Italian brand) fit perfectly into Lady Gaga's artistic approach, which has always been based, as very serious analysts explain, on an “aesthetic of the copy”.

Joker 2without madness

After these two fabulous appetizers, we expected a lot of Joker: Folie à deuxthird feature starring Gaga in the headliner, to find out where the actress was in cinema. This time, there is everything that defines Gaga: the makeup (that of the Joker's lover and “partner in crime”, Harley Quinn) and the songs, Joker 2 being a musical. She doesn't stand out in the film (she even “unlearned” to sing for the occasion, another Actors Studio feat), but she nevertheless remains strangely peripheral, with director Todd Phillips focusing mainly on Joaquin Phoenix's performance, giving the impression that the singer is mainly there because of the result of a marketing equation: “Comics + madness + music = let's call Gaga!”

Feeling reinforced by the fact that she took advantage of the promotion of Joker 2 to release a surprise album, Harlequininspired by the universe of the film, consisting mainly of covers of American music standards, in line with his retro albums with Tony Bennett. If Joker: madness for two seems to be a serious matter for Phillips and Phoenix (a rather radical film, where they atomize their own creation), it almost resembles, in the Gaga cosmogony, a simple extension of her multimedia universe, a “companion film” to the music video for piece “The Joker”, where she repainted the portrait of Mona Lisa. Can the actress escape the singer? Next time, we would like to see her in a film without music or makeup. History of broadening the definition of Gaga's cinema.