My Mother, the Punk Rocker: On Celeste Bell’s Documentary Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché

POLY STYRENE: I AM A CLICHE 

(Celeste Bell and Paul Sng, 2021, UK, 96 minutes) 

"It's been a rollercoaster ride, but I wouldn't change a thing."--Poly Styrene to The Guardian in 2011

Made with Chinese-British filmmaker Paul Sng (Sleaford Mods: Invisible Britain), Celeste Bell's documentary about Poly Styrene, née Marianne Elliot-Said, isn't a standard cradle-to-grave portrait, but rather a daughter's journey into her mother's past in order to make sense of their relationship. 

That makes it more intimate and less objective than most music documentaries; an approach that can prove a blessing or a curse depending on the director. The most obvious pitfall: first-person films can end up saying more about their non-famous makers than their famous subjects. For my money, Aiyana Elliott's uncompromising 2000 film about her father, The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack, gets the balance right more often than not. 

In Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, Bell narrates and appears on screen, so she starts by centering herself, but Poly's voice is part of the mix, since Oscar-nominated Ethiopian-Irish actress Ruth Negga (Loving, Passing) voices her poems and diary entries, perfectly capturing Poly's soft, high voice. 

As Bell sifts through artifacts, in addition to the 2019 biography she co-authored, the film proceeds through Poly's humble beginnings (Slits biographer Zoë Howe contributed as writer to both book and film). 

 

Born in Brixton in 1957, Poly and her sister, Hazel Emmons, grew up in a council estate, the "half caste" results of a union between a single white mother and an absentee Somali father. Though often insensitively asked, "Where are you from?," Bell insists, "She was a Londoner born and bred." 

More voices continue to come into play, making for a richer, less solipsistic work. Speakers include Lora Logic and Paul Dean (X-Ray Spex, Essential Logic), musician and filmmaker Don Letts (Big Audio Dynamite), Gina Birch and Ana Da Silva (the Raincoats), Rhoda Dakar (the Special AKA, the Bodysnatchers), Pauline Black (the Selecter), Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, Julie Ruin), musician and professor Vivien Goldman (the Flying Lizards), punk poet John Cooper Clarke (snapping gum in archival footage), fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, and chat show host Jonathan Ross. 

Poly's embrace of punk provided a sense of community missing from her youth. In the words of a want ad she had placed in Melody Maker, she hoped to assemble a band of "young punx who want to stick it together." X-Ray Spex provided her with an outlet to sing about her concerns, like consumerism, and wear whatever she wanted, including outfits she made and sold herself. "I actually started to sing because of her, to be perfectly honest," admits Neneh Cherry, also of mixed-race heritage, who would go on to join the Slits and Rip Rig + Panic before embarking on a solo career. 

Like Kathryn Ferguson's recent Sinéad O'Connor documentary, Nothing Compares, I Am a Cliché avoids talking heads. Speakers comment from the perspective of today, but only archival images appear on screen. When filmmakers cycle through the same photographs and video clips repeatedly, tedium can result, but Bell and Sng have assembled enough material to keep things moving (I contributed to their well-run Indiegogo campaign, and wear my Poly-in-a-combat-helmet t-shirt often).   

After signing to EMI, X-Ray Spex released their sole album with the original lineup, 1978's electrifying Germ-Free Adolescents, made TV appearances, and went on tour, even playing a residency at New York's CBGB that Thurston Moore remembers with fondness--he felt "anointed" when Poly handed him the mic to shout along with "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!" In 1991's indispensable punk diary England's Dreaming, Jon Savage describes Poly as "a striking woman with a surprisingly loud, gutsy laugh."  

If New York was beneficial to the band's nascent career, it was terrible for Poly's mental health, and she was increasingly uncomfortable with the attention and pressure that accompanied fame. She started to have visions and ended up sectioned several times. What she saw as a spiritual awakening, friends and loved ones saw differently. Both things can be true. To add insult to injury, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, rather than bipolar disorder, and accordingly mistreated. The yearning to breathe free led her to pull the plug on X-Ray Spex in 1979 when she was 21.

Poly's husband, Adrian, and daughter, Celeste, would arrive in the years afterward as she continued to make music, but with increasingly less support from record labels and music press alike. Oddly and disappointingly, there's no mention of her 1981 solo debut Translucence, 1986 EP God's and Goddesses, or even X-Ray Spex's 1995 return with Conscious Consumer.

 

Then Poly found Hare Krishna, which took priority over family and career (Lora Logic, née Susan Whitby, would join her at Hertfordshire's George Harrison-donated Bhaktivedanta Manor). Spiritual practice, however, wasn't a replacement for proper psychiatric care, and Celeste ended up living with her grandmother after a protracted court case. "Creative people don't always make the best parents," she says about her distracted, unpredictable mother. "And she certainly neglected my needs at times."

The documentary then skips ahead to Poly's 2011 comeback album on which she collaborated with Viv Albertine (the Slits), Youth (Killing Joke), and her reconciled daughter. Musically, she hadn't missed a step. As Albertine says in her illuminating 2014 memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys., "I'm glad she got her drive back and made her album, Generation Indigo, before she died... She was a real doer."

After years of extreme ups and downs, Poly had been in a good place. And then she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was discovered too late, because she had, once again, been misdiagnosed and mistreated when she sought help, a notoriously common occurrence for women of color.  

Celeste and Sng speed through her final months. Though they don't mention it, she ended up in hospice care that same year, during which time she gave a remarkable interview to Dave Simpson of The Guardian--well worth a click if you missed it at the time.  

In the end, there's too much Celeste in this film and not enough Poly. It's the daughter's story to tell, and her perspective has value, but she's a consistent on-screen presence. We're constantly looking at her--she's asking us to see her. And maybe that's the point: by asking to be seen, particularly by those of us interested in her mother, she seems to have found a way to make up for the attention Poly wasn't always able to give.

 

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché opens at the Beacon Cinema on Feb 2 and on VOD on Feb 4. Generation Indigo cover image from Discogs, all others from Poly Doc Ltd, BBC Arena (Poly portrait), Kino Library (Poly on stage with X-Ray Spex), and Falcon Stuart (X-Ray Spex collage).  

From Sir, with Love: Sidney Poitier: 1927-2022

Here's the pre-obituary I wrote for Amazon's now-defunct blog, Armchair Commentary, in 2009. I'm happy to say Poitier outlived this piece by 13 years. 

Oscar-winning actor and director Sidney Poitier died on January 6, 2022 at the age of 94.

Best known for the movies Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and To Sir, with Love, Poitier divided his time between the silver screen, the theater, and the civil rights movement, leaving an enduring body of work and opening doors to other performers of color. 

 

For his part in Lilies of the Fields, Poitier was the first African-American actor to win the Academy Award for best actor in a leading role.

Born in Miami, Florida, Poitier grew up in the Bahamas and learned his trade through a stint with the American Negro Theatre, through which he befriended fellow actors and activists Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee. He found another lifelong friend in Richard Widmark with whom he starred in No Way Out and The Bedford Incident.

Other notable works for film and television include Blackboard Jungle, The Defiant Ones with Tony Curtis, Otto Preminger’s Porgy and Bess with Dorothy Dandridge and Sammy Davis, Jr. (long unavailable on home video), A Patch of Blue, and the made-for-TV movies Separate But Equal as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Mandela and de Klerk, where he played Nelson Mandela opposite Sir Michael Caine's F.W. de Klerk.

Poitier penned two memoirs, 1980's This Life and 2007's New York Times bestseller The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, and one novel, Montaro Caine, and directed nine feature films, including Uptown Saturday Night and Let's Do It Again with Bill Cosby, and Stir Crazy with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. Released in 1975, Let's Do It Again remains one of the most profitable Black feature films of all time.

Among his many accomplishments, Poitier garnered a Tony nomination for playing Walter Lee Younger in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (he also starred in the 1961 motion picture with Ruby Dee) and, although he chose not to use the honorarium "Sir," a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1974. Eighteen years later, the American Film Institute recognized him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Furthermore, John Guare based his play Six Degrees of Separation on a real-life con man claiming to be Poitier's son. Rapper-turned-sitcom star Will Smith began the road to movie stardom when he took on the part in the 1993 feature-film adaptation.

Sidney Poitier is survived by his widow of 46 years, Joanna Shimkus, and six children, including two with his first wife, Juanita Hardy. Youngest daughter, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, follows in her father's substantial footsteps as a television and film actress.   

Click here for my obituary for Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison who directed Sidney Poitier in The Heat of the Night. 

Images from the Motion Picture Academy (Poitier in 1964), The Library of Congress (Poitier with Dorothy Dandridge in 1959's Porgy and Bess), and the IMDb (poster for the Warner Bros release Let's Do It Again).

Taking Drugs to Make Movies to Take Drugs To: Iván Zulueta's 1979 Psychodrama Arrebato

ARREBATO / Rapture

 

 

 

(Iván Zulueta, 1979, Spain, 115 mins)

"Fuck the movies."

José (Eusebio Poncela)

 

On the surface, 1979's Arrebato ("Rapture") is a horror movie about the horror of becoming overly invested in the making of horror movies. 

 

In that sense, it recalls Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and Prano Bailey-Bond's Censor (2021), even as it pre-dates both of those films, one about a British sound mixer unraveling while working on a giallo in Italy and the other about a censor unraveling while working as a government-sponsored editor during Britain's "video nasty" era.

 

On a deeper level, it's a film about drug addiction in which film is as much of a drug as the drugs consumed while making films, an idea the Spacemen 3 once explored as Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To. As the addictions feed off each other, art and life become indivisible.   

As it begins, a slinky vampire with long, dark hair strolls out of her glass-topped coffin to skulk about before José (Dwight Yoakam doppelgänger Eusebio Poncela, The Cannibal Man), a Madrid horror director and his editor stop what they're doing to bicker. She isn't real, just a character in José's film, but he doesn't like the way she appears to be looking at the camera. "Meaningless cinema," he sniffs before leaving for the day. 

 

He's in a shitty mood when he gets home to find that Pedro (Will More, Pedro Almodóvar's Dark Habits), a figure from his past, has sent a reel of Super-8 film, a cassette, and a key. On the off-chance you've forgotten you're watching a film from 1979, these items will surely remind you. 

 

José's night proceeds to get worse as his girlfriend, Ana (Cecilia Roth, looking like Dressed to Kill-era Nancy Allen), won't wake up, the bathroom appliances turn against him, and Pedro, a floppy-haired figure in a Withnail and I-like overcoat, materializes in front of him before disappearing again. What's an angry, jittery guy to do but to shoot some smack? 

 

In a flashback, José drives to Segovia with his ex-girlfriend Marta (Marta Fernández Muro, Almodóvar's Law of Desire) to visit her toothy aunt, Carmen (Carmen Giralt). This is where he first meets her cousin, Pedro, who is obsessed with King Solomon's Mines--not the 1950 movie so much as the illustrated comic featuring stars Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger. Once Carmen has gone to bed, José does some blow with Marta and Pedro. 

 

Though José is the central character, Pedro narrates the film by way of the cassette in a hoarse, whispery voice that plays like a manifestation of José's subconscious. Back in the present, José introduces Ana to smack. She's concerned she might become addicted, but he insists that it's all about moderation--proof that he has no idea how addiction works. 

 

Here and elsewhere, Iván Zulueta, a poster designer-turned filmmaker, leaves nothing to the imagination, though the full-frontal nudity and polymorphous sexuality never feels unnecessary or exploitative, not least because his sole directorial credit is largely autobiographical. Fascist dictator Franco had left office just four years prior, and Zulueta and his friend and supporter, Pedro Almodóvar, would lead the charge, by way of La Movida Madrileña, to expand the possibilities of Spanish film. 

 

José's two worlds collide when he brings Ana to meet Pedro. Both want access to Pedro's body, drugs, and film project, leading to a tense atmosphere. If Ana is relatively mature, Pedro is a child with his Silly Putty, Betty Boop doll, and plastic container of Slime (I had the same stuff in junior high--it was nasty). José straddles the line between the two.  

Pedro proceeds to project home movies on his bedroom wall consisting of grainy images of Marta's home and its surroundings. Pretty quotidian stuff, though he finds it terribly exciting. In the present, José and Ana watch Pedro's latest film. Compared to the earlier material, it's more personal, sophisticated...and insidious.  

 

Now living in the city after Carmen sold their home, Pedro has become fixated on filmmaking as something that can bring him to rapture. The ultimate drug. He keeps a camera trained on his bed at all times to capture his drug-enhanced sleep, becoming convinced that another person or, more likely, a supernatural force has become involved with this otherwise solitary pursuit. When his friend, Gloria (Helena Fernán-Gómez, voiced by Almodóvar), turns off the camera after he nods off during a visit, he wakes up in a panic, convinced that he can't live without it.  

 

By this point, Zulueta has switched focus to Pedro who grows increasingly pale, red-eyed--vampiric. Throughout, the score ranges from ominous electronic rumblings to tinkly melodies played on (what sounds like) toy instruments, including squeaks, rattle-shakes, and baby lamb bleats. 

 

As José and Pedro continue to unravel, one by compulsively making a film and the other by compulsively watching it, the story threads ultimately entwine in gratifyingly proto-Videodromesque fashion.

 

Pedro Almodóvar, who would work with Cecilia Roth on 1999's All about My Mother (among other films), has proclaimed Arrebato his favorite horror film, but it goes further than that. In their early days, he truly believed that Zulueta, who would return to his native San Sebastián after the commercial failure of the film, was the superior filmmaker. A more unexpected fan: David Fincher, who references it in Fight Club. 

 

Beyond the fact that they worked and socialized together, I would imagine that Almodóvar's enthusiasm for Arrebato has something to do with the way José and Pedro can't live with or without film. Or drugs. Any more than they can make or consume one without the other. Like a drug, film is the lie that tells the truth, but a human body can only take so much of the pure, uncut stuff. In Zulueta's case, a suddenly stalled film career would not kill him and nor would his longtime heroin addiction (he passed away in 2009), but after giving it everything he had, he had nothing left to give. 

Click here for more Spanish horror. 

 

 

The new 4K edition of Arrebato will be available on VOD Dec 21, followed by a DVD and Blu-ray on Jan 25. All images courtesy Altered Innocence. 

Unraveling the Mystery of an Elusive Singer in Karen Dalton: In My Own Time

KAREN DALTON: IN MY OWN TIME 
(Robert Yapkowitz and Richard Peete, USA, 2020, 85 mins)

Karen Dalton, a singer and guitarist who would inspire Bob Dylan and Nick Cave, had the long hair and slim figure of her female contemporaries in the folk scene, except her look and sound was rougher and edgier--especially after she lost two of her bottom teeth in an altercation. As Cave notes in the film, "There’s a sort of demand placed on the listener. You have to enter her world, and it's a despairing world, a dark world."

She's also an artist who left behind few recorded artifacts, which has contributed to her mystique. 

In their documentary, Robert Yapkowitz and Richard Peete explain how that sound developed through interviews with her daughter, her friends, and her collaborators. Julia Holter provides the score and Missouri-born alt-folk artist Angel Olsen reads excerpts from her journals, lyrics, and poems. Interestingly, Olsen's plainspoken alto recalls Chloe Sevigny's work on the Candy Darling documentary Beautiful Darling, another film about a performer who made a mark in NYC before fading from view. 

Abbe Baird, Karen's daughter with her first husband, Don Dalton, remembers that the housewife thing didn't suit her mother in the slightest. She tried twice with two different husbands while still in her teens, and ultimately rejected the whole deal, putting her at odds with the average young Oklahoma mother in the early-1960s. 

Though she had grown up in a musical family, Karen hadn't grown up among professional musicians, but that's the life she sought for herself, even if it meant leaving two children behind and moving to New York (the film only mentions that she left Abbe, but she left her son, Lee, too). As collaborator and Holy Modal Rounder Peter Stampfel puts it, Karen wasn't simply someone who grew up with folk music, "She were a folk."

It may seem selfish, except Karen never stopped thinking about her daughter, and so she found a way to involve Abbe in her life. It's the son she appears to have forgotten about, at least in the course of this narrative, though other sources note that she would see him again.   

Nonetheless, it was a hardscrabble life for mother and child, an echo of the lives lived by her great grandparents who relocated from Mississippi to Oklahoma during the Great Depression. In New York, Karen found friends and admirers, but grew bitter that original songwriters, like Dylan, were getting all the attention, while her interpretations of preexisting material, fine as they were, weren't making the same kind of impact. 

Further, like the reclusive Nick Drake in England, she didn't enjoy performing live at a time when artists needed to play out as often as possible in order to master their craft, reach new listeners, and attract industry attention (as with Drake, she was both a skilled finger-picking guitarist and an expressive vocalist). Her frustrations serve as a reminder that the road to success, both then and now, has always involved some degree of presentation and promotion. Dalton, on the other hand, just wanted to make music. 

Fortunately, she knew better than to keep spinning her wheels in the city, so she moved to the country, and started a new life with a new partner. In Colorado, she found greater satisfaction playing at house parties than music venues. It's no way to make a living, and so she and Richard struggled financially. It's also strongly suggested that a certain well known singer-songwriter introduced her to and/or encouraged her use of hard drugs, the equivalent of a match to a powder keg filled with anger, bitterness, and resentment. 

The story doesn't end there. There were more ups and downs to come. As Peter Walker, a friend and composer, describes Karen's New York sojourns, "She seemed there, but not there--separated from all these people trying to be stars." Every time she came close to making a living at this thing she loved more than life, some kind of setback would erode her progress. 

By the end of her time on Earth, however, she had still managed to record two full albums. Though the filmmakers don't mention it, the resurgence of interest in her work didn't merely develop organically with time, but largely as a result of reissued and repackaged versions of her work by Koch, Megaphone, Delmore Recording Society, and especially Light in the Attic, which released three albums with abundant extras, starting in 2006.

Yapkowitz and Peete don't completely solve the mystery of Karen Dalton, and there's no reason they could or should. She isn't here to tell her story, and even if she were, she might not want to, but she did leave journals behind, allowing the filmmakers to include her voice as part of the narrative. Though friends suggest that depression may have contributed to her dark moods, nobody knows for sure, and the filmmakers wisely avoid any armchair psychoanalyzing.   

As much as they excluded details that might have provided for a fuller, if more complicated portrait, at the very least they've helped to set the record straight regarding her death, which has been misinterpreted elsewhere by those, like country singer Lacy J. Dalton--she liked Karen's surname so much that she took it for her own--who speculated as to what happened, without knowing the full details. I found at least one article that framed Lacy's speculation as fact. 

In the end, the truth about Karen's life is no prettier than the myths and rumors, but she deserves to be remembered for the person she was rather than the person people thought she was--or wanted her to be. 

 

Karen Dalton: In My Own Time plays Northwest Film Forum Nov 10-14.  

Images: Dalton portrait from the cover of Recording Is the Trip: The Karen Dalton Archives on Megaphone via Light in the Attic, Dalton with Dylan and Fred Neil from Fred W. McDarrah/Greenwich Entertainment, Dalton looking back from Alamy/The Economist, and Dalton in daguerreotype mode from the cover of Green Rocky Road on Gaslight Records.   

Beth B Documents a Singular Performer in Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over

LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER 

(Beth B, USA, 2019, 77 minutes) 

New York filmmaker Beth B has been documenting, fictionalizing, and re-contextualizing underground culture since the late-1970s, perfectly positioning her to take on a profile of no wave performer and spoken word artist Lydia Lunch. 

For the most part, Beth cedes the stage to Lunch, whose interview forms the spine of the film. If her stories can be unsettling, she has a compelling way of telling them. It isn't just her nicotine-burnished voice or her bluntly poetic words, but the wry humor that underpins most everything she says. As with her lyrics and poetry, she sounds like someone who emerged from the womb knowing the score. 

Lunch explains that she grew up in Rochester, NY during an era of protest, and took inspiration from those who stood up for their beliefs. It led her to trade the constraints of suburbia for the no-holds-barred freedoms of pre-gentrification NYC. Performances by Suicide and Mars inspired her to start her own band, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, through which she channeled her rage at patriarchy, authority, and bourgeois complacency. 

The group secured their reputation through an appearance on 1978's Eno-compiled No New York alongside other heavy hitters, like DNA and the Contortions. While some colleagues downplayed their image with nondescript outfits, Lunch played up her crimson-lipped, Bettie Page-meets-Anna Karina good looks. Other groups, releases, video projects, and musical collaborations followed with Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, and Jim "Foetus" Thirlwell. Though not mentioned in the film, she would also collaborate with Einstürzende Neubauten, Swans, and Sonic Youth on 1985's immortal "Death Valley '69." 

Alongside her music career, Beth covers Lunch's years as a Richard Kern collaborator. Though she helped to shape the material, Kern expresses disappointment that Village Voice critic J. Hoberman found their sexually-explicit 1985 film The Right Side of My Brain "misogynist." If anyone was exploiting Lunch, both participants agree, it was Lunch herself. She and Kern also worked with Beth B; Kern appears in 1991's American Nightmare and Lunch appears in 1996's Visiting Desire. (I've reviewed two other documentaries by the filmmaker, but haven't seen any of her short films.) 

As the documentary unfurls, it becomes clear that there isn't much difference between Lunch in person and Lunch on stage. 

Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and L7's Donita Sparks reminisce about the wilder moments they spent with her, though band mate and future Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos's story goes furthest in ways I won't spoil here. Other speakers include the Geraldine Fibbers' Carla Bozulich, the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black's Kembra Pfahler, performance artist Ron Athey, and Darkside's Nicolas Jaar, an ardent fan who would become a friend.  

If some of her peers have mellowed out--or died in the case of Howard--Lunch isn't likely to follow suit any time soon. As Nick Soulsby puts it in the film's companion book, "A devotion to nomadism, physical and intellectual, seem to have made her immune to the drag factors that tell humans to buy a couch, sit down, shut up, and repeat themselves ad infinitum." 

Forty years after she began, she's been performing with her band Retrovirus featuring guitarist Weasel Walter, bass player Tim Dahl, and former Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore drummer Bob Bert, a friend for 36 years. 

I doubt Beth B will mellow out any time soon either, though I wish she had explored Lunch's entrepreneurial side as the founder of her own recording and publishing company. It may represent the less sexy part of her story, but when it comes to sticking it to the man--Lunch's modus operandi--acting as her own boss was one of the most punk things she ever did.

Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over is available via Kino Marquee and the usual digital operators (Google Play, YouTube, Vudu). Nick Soulsby's book is out via Jawbone Press. Images: portrait from Kino Lorber, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks from Discogs, and Lunch-as-seen-by-Kern from Subbacultcha.

That Summer Feeling's Gonna Haunt You the Rest of Your Life in Leos Carax's Annette

ANNETTE 

(Leos Carax, 2021, France, rated R, 140 mins) 

There's absolutely no one like French filmmaker Leos Carax (not his real name), and if he didn't exist, we would have had to invent him. His singular vision is a bracing tonic in a play-it-safe movie world. It means that he's unafraid to plunge full-bore into ridiculousness, and yet his films never feel like the work of a showoff or a scatterbrain. They feel like the work of Leos Carax. 

Annette complicates that pattern by bringing collaboration into play. For his first English-language feature and full-fledged musical--music has always loomed large in his work--Carax teamed up with avant-pop duo Sparks, who cowrote both music and script. It's the Los Angeles duo's second collaborative effort of the year after Edgar Wright's The Sparks Brothers, which is clearly the work of three people, and I mean that in the best of ways, since I never sensed Wright imposing his will on Ron and Russell Mael. He arranged the parts; they provided the raw material. It's great. 

Annette opens by breaking the fourth wall as Carax, in a control booth, directs Sparks, in a studio. They launch into "So May We Start?," and then they walk out of the studio, still singing, to encounter stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. The band, stars, and backup singers stroll out of the building and down the street, running into costar Simon Helberg along the way. As the song ends, the story begins. The message is clear: "This is a movie. This is not real life." 

In the movie, Cotillard plays opera singer Ann Defrasnoux and Driver plays anti-comedian Henry McHenry, a disheveled, bathrobe-clad performer. She's sleek, he's not--press dub them "The Beauty and the Bastard." Beautifully-lit scenes by DP Caroline Champetier (Holy Motors) of Henry riding his motorcycle through deserted streets at night, sometimes with Ann and sometimes without, bring Carax's Mauvais Sang to mind. Guy likes his bikes.

During a gig, Henry announces his engagement to Ann. The audience lets out a collective gasp. Carax marks the chapters of their love story with excerpts from an excitable Entertainment Tonight-like show called Showbiz News. SBN breaks the news of their wedding, followed by news of Ann's pregnancy.

Duets, like "We Love Each Other So Much," illustrate their relationship, while the backup singers from the prologue often appear to add depth and grandeur. If Cotillard and Driver aren't great singers, they're good enough, much like Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge (soprano Catherine Trottmann lends Ann's opera performances verisimilitude).  

 

 

Then, Ann gives birth. The backup singers, dressed as hospital workers, sing through her labor. Though the couple reacts to Annette as if she were human, she's an animatronic puppet with jug ears and articulated limbs. This isn't played as Chucky-like horror, though it's certainly disquieting. 

In the midst of their bliss, damaging news about Henry starts to make the rounds, but Carax drops this subplot as quickly as he brings it up, only to move into even more disturbing territory as Henry makes a chilling confession on stage that turns the entire audience against him. They express their displeasure in song; he responds in kind. The confession predicts the cataclysmic events to come, though Carax never returns to the accusations against Henry, making me wonder why he brought them up in the first place (Carax suggests that Ann, while half-asleep in her limousine, dreamt up the whole thing).  

Annette, meanwhile, grows from a baby into a toddler as her parents' marriage hits the skids. When they take an ocean voyage in an attempt to reconnect, Carax plays with allusions to Pinocchio and Wuthering Heights. The whale-shaped lamp in Annette's room, for instance, may simply have been intended to lend nautical flair to her surroundings, but the combination of wooden child and whale imagery brings Disney's majestic Pinocchio to mind. Similarly, Annette is about to enter the belly of the beast. 

Bad things continue to happen. Either Henry doesn't know how to be happy, he isn't happy, or he isn't quite right in the head. All three things can be true. Since his 1984 debut, Boy Meets Girl (starring cinematic alter ego Denis Lavant), Carax's films tend to follow a similar trajectory: men and women fall in love only to find that they're bad for each other. He splits the difference between romance and nihilism. 

As she grows older, Annette takes after her mother in revealing a gift for song. Talking will come later. This brings her into contact with Ann's accompanist (Florence Foster Jenkins' Helberg) who has become a conductor. The love story then gives way to a new narrative suffused with jealousy, exploitation, and transference. Though I expected the relationship between Ann and Henry to form the heart of the film, the title explains all: the deeper story involves Henry and Annette, though the moments between the Conductor and the girl prove more affecting than those between the girl and her father for reasons that go beyond musical affinities.

As Annette's red hair grows longer, Henry's shrinks and takes on a silver cast until he ends up looking like an elongated Leos Carax. I suspect it isn't completely coincidental, since Carax had a daughter with Russian-French actress Yekaterina Golubeva (Carax's Herman Melville adaptation Pola X), who died under mysterious circumstances in 2011. An end credit confirms my theory that Sparks' screenplay holds personal resonance: "Pour Nastya," the name of their now-adult daughter. 

For all of its visual beauty and musical effervescence, Annette is one of the most downbeat musicals I've ever seen. If the conclusion lets in a little light, unlike Lars von Trier's ultra-gloomy Dancer in the Dark, it's still the story of a damaged person who can't resist dragging everyone he cares about down with him. As ever, though, Carax is no fool, and the sequence that plays over the end credits brings things back to the beginning: "This is a movie. This is not real life"--except it's hard to shake the feeling that it kinda, sorta is--or could've been if Carax didn't get his demons under control.  

Annette opens on Friday, August 6, at the Crest in Seattle and Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue. It comes to Amazon Prime on August 20. Images: Henry from Artforum, Sparks from Polygon (Anna Webber/Focus Features), Ann from Amazon Studios, Caroline Champetier shooting Annette from AFC (Kris Dewitte / Facts of Emotions), and cast still from Sony Music.  

The Sugarhill Gang Wants Their Name Back in Roger Paradiso's 2011 Documentary

This review originally appeared on The Stranger's Line Out music blog, which disappeared several years ago. I recovered it via The Wayback Machine.

FILMThe Sugarhill Gang Wants Their Name Back

posted by KATHY FENNESSY on THU, JUL 19, 2012 at 9:40 AM

I WANT MY NAME BACK
(Roger Paradiso, US, 2011, 93 mins.)

• ROGER PARADISO
• The Gang today

I Want My Name Back isn't so much the story of the Sugarhill Gang, but the story of their lawsuit against Sugar Hill Records.

In 2005, Vanity Fair published a profile of the label (Steven Daly, "Hip-Hop Happens"). Roger Paradiso follows the template of the article for the first half of the film, but moves in a different direction once identity theft enters the picture.

He starts by introducing Wonder Mike (Michael Wright) and Master Gee (Guy O'Brien) of the Sugarhill Gang. From 1979-1984, they released three platinum albums and had a 10 million-selling hit with the 15-minute "Rapper's Delight."

Then, Paradiso profiles what he terms the Con Artists: Sylvia and Joseph "Joe" Robinson Sr., the label founders, and Morris "Moe" Levy, their silent partner. By phone, Daly discusses Robinson's R&B; career and Levy's mob connections. Subsequent signings would include Spoonie G, the Funky 4 Plus 1, and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five (I'm not sure why he wasn't able to get Daly on camera; using a phone call in lieu of a pro recording always sounds cheap).

• SUGAR HILL RECORDS

Just as Levy would "share" songwriting credits with his artists at Roulette , he and the Robinsons—including their sons—would do the same to the Sugar Hill acts. With most of their earnings going to the label, the Gang decided to hang it up in 1984, but Joey Robinson Jr. started to pass himself off as "Master Gee" in the 1990s. Then, after Joe Sr. died and Sylvia retired, Joey Jr. and his brother, Leland, took over the label. Just when the situation couldn't get much worse, a 2002 fire consumed the Sugar Hill Studios and destroyed everything in the place.

After Sylvia copyrighted the name "the Sugarhill Gang," the members decided to reform and record an album (with Hen Dogg and DJ T. Dynasty). Big Bank Hank, unfortunately, opted to perform with Joey Jr.'s fake version of the group. Following in his mother's footsteps, Junior proceeded to trademark the names "the Sugarhill Gang," "Wonder Mike," and "Master Gee" Is this guy a piece of work or what?

With few resources at their disposal, Master Gee and Wonder Mike turned to Jay Berger from Artists Rights Enforcement Corp. to represent their interests. Once he enters the picture, this music documentary segues into a film about copyright law, which isn't a bad thing, but don't go expecting a conventional biography.

I Want My Name Back is unapologetically one-sided, and if you only want to know how the case was resolved, you can Google the results, but if you want to hear Wonder Mike and Master Gee tell their side of the story in detail, Paradiso gives them ample opportunity (other speakers include Grandmaster Caz, Melle Mell from the Furious Five, and Vinnie and Treach from Naughty by Nature). Fortunately, they come across as reliable witnesses to a despicable injustice.

I Want My Name Back plays The Northwest Film Forum (1515 12th Ave) for a second and final set of screenings: tonight, July 19, at 7 and 9 pm. I'd imagine a DVD release is imminent...unless the Robinsons have anything to say about it.

Comments (2) RSS

Oldest FirstUnregistered OffRegistered OnAdd a comment

1

karma for not giving caz a dime; i'm sure he had some jewels to say.

Posted by Larry Mizell, Jr. on July 19, 2012 at 5:45 PM · Report this

2

@1 He did! He goes into detail about the rap Big Bank Hank stole, i.e. "I'm Casanova, and the rest is fly." You're not Caz--Cassanova Fly--dude!

Posted by Kathy Fennessy  on July 20, 2012 at 7:44 AM · Report this