A heart that beats in time to Vivaldi, a scalpel that slices flesh with the precision of a dance step, a cigarette that burns between the fingers like the final act of a foretold tragedy. The cinema of Bob Fosse, and in particular his terminal, testamentary masterpiece, "All That Jazz", doesn't merely tell a story; it performs an autopsy in real time, an elegiac choreography of its own demise. It is a work that throbs with a life so desperate it embraces death as the last, inevitable variety number. To fully grasp the magnitude of this symphony of collapse, one must abandon the idea of a traditional musical and embrace that of a febrile delirium, a syncopated montage of an artist’s soul cannibalizing itself in the name of the show.

Joe Gideon, played by a never-more-feverish and charismatic Roy Scheider, is not Fosse’s alter ego: he is Fosse himself, stripped of all artifice, laid bare on the operating table of the seventh art. The film’s genesis is legendary: in 1975, while editing his Lenny Bruce biopic by day and rehearsing the musical "Chicago" on Broadway by night, Fosse suffered a massive heart attack. "All That Jazz" is the chronicle, transfigured and spectacularized, of that event. It is the titanic and mad attempt to direct his own death, to edit the scenes of his own agony, to choose the soundtrack for his final breath. If in "8½" Federico Fellini staged the crisis of the artist paralyzed by inaction, Fosse orchestrates the crisis of the artist consumed by action, a man who cannot stop creating, seducing, destroying himself, because to stop would be tantamount to dying. And when death truly comes knocking, his only response is to turn it into a grandiose show.

The film operates on a plane of constant semiotic short-circuitry. The editing room, where Gideon is painstakingly assembling his latest film ("The Stand-Up," a clear reference to "Lenny"), becomes his critical conscience, the place where the fragments of his life are analyzed, critiqued, discarded. The rehearsals for his new Broadway show are the stage for his creative tyranny, an arena where he squeezes every last drop of sweat and talent from his dancers, reflections of his own obsession with perfection. And then there is the hospital bed, which transforms into a surreal talk show of the soul, where he converses with Angelique (a celestial and lethal Jessica Lange), the angel of death dressed in white, the ultimate muse who demands not inspiration, but surrender. Angelique is not the grim reaper of tradition, but an art critic, a confidante, the only spectator who truly understands his show. She is the Beatrice of a Divine Comedy steeped in amphetamines and Dexedrine, guiding him not toward Paradise, but toward the acceptance of "game over."

The narrative structure is a masterpiece of associative editing that anticipates decades of postmodern cinema. Fosse and his legendary editor Alan Heim shatter temporal linearity, weaving past, present, and fantasy into an unstoppable flow. An audition for a musical ("On Broadway") dissolves into the memory of a squalid burlesque number. A dialogue with an ex-wife becomes a song-and-dance number full of recriminations. The apex of this technique is the chilling sequence in which real footage of open-heart surgery is cross-cut with a meeting of the show's producers, who coldly discuss how much his potential death will cost the production. Here, "All That Jazz" transcends cinema: it becomes a visual essay on the ruthless commodification of art and the artist, where the creator’s body is just another line item in the budget. The aesthetic is one of nightclub expressionism, with its stark shadows, dazzling neons, and the sweat glistening on the dancers’ tense bodies—veritable hieroglyphs of a sensual desperation.

The film is deeply rooted in its context, the end of the 1970s, the so-called "Me Decade." It is the epitaph for the unbridled hedonism and narcissistic voracity of an entire generation of artists who emerged from the New Hollywood. Joe Gideon is the archetype of the auteur-demiurge of that era: brilliant, despotic, unfaithful, dependent on all manner of stimulants to sustain an unsustainable pace of life and work. His philosophy, "It’s showtime, folks!", is an existential mantra, a battle cry against the void, a way of giving shape and meaning to the chaos of life through the iron discipline of performance. In this, Gideon/Fosse resembles certain protagonists of American confessional literature, from John Berryman to Robert Lowell: artists who used their lives as raw material for a ruthlessly honest art, paying the price with their own mental and physical health.

But it is in the finale that "All That Jazz" ascends to a level of pure cinematic transcendence. After moving through the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) in a series of dreamlike musical numbers, Gideon stages his own death as a colossal, Las Vegas-style production number. To the tune of "Bye Bye Love," he bids farewell to all the women in his life, who applaud and kiss him as he proceeds down a corridor of neon lights toward a black body bag—the final curtain, the last stage costume. There is no self-pity, no tragedy. There is only the ultimate awareness that everything, even extinction, can be transformed into art. It is an act of unprecedented creative audacity, the final move of a choreographer who manages to orchestrate even his own cardiac arrest. It is the celebration of life through the acceptance of death, the recognition that the only immortality granted to the artist lies in the work he leaves behind, even if that work is the story of his own dissolution.

"All That Jazz" is more than a film; it is an electrocardiogram of the soul, a danced confession, a final, dazzling pirouette on the edge of the abyss. It is a work that, like its protagonist, smokes too much, works too much, loves too much, and burns the candle at both ends, knowing that the light will be all the brighter, however brief. Bob Fosse died of a heart attack in 1987, almost as if to confirm his film’s prophecy. But he left us this flaming monument to the cost of creativity, a musical that is sung not with the voice, but with the irregular beat of a heart that gave everything for one last, unforgettable round of applause.