Che director Steven Soderbergh recently told Anne Thompson that his eyebrow-raising 3D musical about Cleopatra is going to be tonally inspired by Gilda, King Vidor’s 1946 noir starring Rita Hayworth. Which is … interesting.

Obviously, Gilda is not really a musical. Hayworth performs a couple of memorable numbers in the film, such as the “Put The Blame on Mame” scene above, but these numbers don’t musicalize the narrative or advance the plot within the number, as much as they comment on the subtext of the relationships. The performances themselves (particularly in the case of “Mame”) become plot points, and they’re only naturalized within the non-musical narrative because the Gilda character is a professional nightclub singer. The vampy (yet cheery!) performance style is dictated by the fact that the character is using her stage persona to say things that she can’t put into words in a normal conversation. It’s difficult to imagine what Soderbergh means when he suggests that he’s going to apply this tone to the story of Cleopatra. Does he simply mean his characters will sing their feelings while the book tells the story? Or is he actually going to try to duplicate that staginess literally, maybe by going for the Chicago “It’s all a fantasy!” gambit, which would allow an Egyptian queen to have an active inner life as a chorus girl?

Regardless of which way it swings or what he really means, it’s hard to imagine anything taken from Gilda being directly compatible with the music of Guided by Voices who, according to Variety, have already written the songs (sometime GbV bassist Jim Greer also wrote the screenplay). I imagine that once Hugh Jackman and Catherine Zeta-Jones get their jazz hands on the material it won’t look or sound much like the defiantly lo-fi and often inscrutable Guided by Voices of old (see below), but in this time of global turmoil I’d rather just bunker up with my memories of the 90s until the inevitable disappointment is shoved in my face.