LAFF 2014: JIMI ALL IS BY MY SIDE

A scene from Jimi: All is By My Side. 

A walk with a maestro 

By Ed Rampell

John Ridley has followed up his 2014 Oscar-winning screenplay for 12 Years a Slave by writing and directing a must-see Jimi Hendrix biopic, one of LA Film Festival’s most highly enjoyable movies. As is befitting the screenwriter of Solomon Northup’s slavery saga, Ridley exposes how racism -- among other things -- affected and afflicted the virtuoso guitarist in Jimi: All is by My Side.

The feature follows Hendrix (rapper André Benjamin, aka André 3000)  from the time he is plucked from obscurity while performing backup in New York clubs and recording studios and brought to London, where he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience and his astounding talent earns him the recognition Hendrix so richly deserved. The “plucker” from obscurity is Linda Keith (Imogen Poots), who is Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards (Ashley Charles, in one of the film’s numerous cameos portraying the era’s hottest rockers) “groupie” -- uh, I mean girlfriend. This mod London lass is sort of “slumming” across the pond while the Stones are on tour when she stumbles upon Hendrix at Manhattan dives. Believing in his talent Linda takes Hendrix under her wing and introduces him to Chas Chandler (amiably, ably played by Andrew Buckley), The Animals’ bassist who is in the process of leaving that group to become a manager of rock acts.

The subtle depiction of Hendrix, full of nuance, by Benjamin -- who, offscreen, is half of the hip-hop duo OutKast -- is nothing short of uncanny. (Can you say “Oscar nomination”?) He perfectly looks and acts the part. Benjamin’s delivery of a single line regarding Hendrix’s mother reveals much about what troubles him and his attitude towards women. A phone call to his father likewise provides insight into Hendrix’s back story. All this helps explain his turbulent relationship with English groupie Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell), and why Linda remained the Foxy Lady who got away. Mr. “Peacey Lovey” had his inner demons and this “Voodoo Child” didn’t always practice the cosmic consciousness he preached.

As noted, Ridley’s script also reveals the prejudice that confronted Hendrix in the U.K., where he falls in with Black nationalists through Ida (Ruth Negga) and the wannabe Malcolm, Michael X.

The film is a sheer pleasure for Hendrix fans to watch as his talent ascends, A particularly enjoyable sequence is when the still unknown Hendrix guests with the Cream at a London gig and Eric Clapton (Danny McColgan) -- whom graffiti proclaims to be “god” -- storms off the stage, as Ginger Baker continues to pound the sharkskins and Jack Bruce wails on. In a delightfully revealing backstage scene sure to give Hendrix fans the proverbial smile of the day, Clapton discloses why he deserted the stage, mid-performance.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers were reportedly unable to secure the rights to some of Hendrix’s greatest hits. Nevertheless, with Jimi: All is by My Side Ridley reveals himself to be a true auteur, as talented a director as he is a screenwriter and novelist. This groovy movie perfectly captures that ’60s scene with a cinema verite documentary-like, fly-on-the-wall flair.

In addition to being a pure delight in the tradition of works about struggling Bohemian artistes (paging La Boheme!), along with the Simon Bolivar biopic The Liberator and Dear White People, which LAFF also screened, as well as the upcoming Civil Rights drama. Selma, Jimi: All is by My Side continues the cinematic surge of Black-themed movies that 12 Years a Slave has helped to spearhead.

  

FILM REVIEW: REACHING FOR THE MOON

Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto) and Lota de Macedo Soares (Gloria Pires) in Reaching for the Moon.

Lunacy and love

By Ed Rampell

I really liked this movie, mainly because of its unusual characters based on actual historical figures. Directed by Brazilian Bruno Barreto, Reaching for the Moon is a biopic about the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto). The film focuses on the long lasting affair between Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares (Gloria Pires). As breakthroughs in same sex marriage continue to make headlines, this tale of a lesbian romance that began back in 1951 is especially timely.

The script by Matthew Chapman, Julie Sayres and Carolino Kotscho, inspired by Carmen Oliveira’s novel, Rare and Commonplace Flowers, has what this critic considers to be a hallmark of good writing: Lots of twists and turns the viewer doesn’t see coming. Succeeding sequences serve to explain previous scenes. The film opens at Central Park, but soon Bishop is on the road to Rio de Janeiro, where events conspire to keep her there for decades as she encounters Soares.

No frail lotus blossom, Soares is arguably the biopic’s most interesting, original character, and throughout this two-hour feature your mystified reviewer continued to change his evolving opinion of her as Soares' character developed. On the one hand, Soares' is an out of the closet lesbian in the Catholic, Portuguese-influenced, patriarchal Brazil of the 1950s. On the other, she is a charter member of the ruling class, so despite her sexual preference she is used to getting her way. After all, if wealth is our international language, then money talks -- regardless of one’s sexual preference.

It’s interesting that Soares' lesbianism is not made much of in Brazil, nor is her ensuing affair with the far more repressed, secretive Bishop. This seems true both when they are at Soares' modernist refuge in the Amazon jungle or staying at her posh penthouse in Rio. There is lush, sumptuous cinematography by Mauro Pinheiro Jr. of the tropics, Copacabana Beach, Sugarloaf, etc., and the  degree of acceptance of the screen couple’s Sapphic sexuality and same sex relationship from the 1950s through the 1960s is indeed eye opening, especially considering how they most likely would have been treated in the staid U.S.A.

It’s interesting to note that currently another great American writer -- Glenn Greenwald, that fierce champion of civil liberties who brought Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA über-snooping to the world’s attention -- is an expat who has left America to live in Brazil with his male Brazilian lover. Perhaps Brazil is ahead of the supposedly “advanced” United States?

This critic has no idea how historically accurate this biopic is, but according to the movie Bishop chafes under the rule of the military junta that overthrows the democratically elected Brazilian government in 1964. As a charter member of the land owning elite Soares' position is different, and it’s interesting to see how political events shape the lovers’ lives.

Director Barreto helmed 1997’s fact-based Four Days in September, which starred Alan Arkin as a U.S. diplomat kidnapped by the MR-8 “terrorist” group, which supported armed resistance to Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship (which, BTW, tortured Brazil’s current President, Dilma Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla, who is currently fighting against the NSA surveillance of her, which Snowden revealed). Barreto also directed the popular 1976 erotic ghost comedy, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, and along with Otto attended the private screening for Reaching for the Moon. His pithy introductory remarks put his finger on Moon’s message, saying: “This is a love story.”

Indeed, straight, gay, trans or whutevah, love is what inspires the poet in all of us -- whether or not we’ve won Pulitzers -- and makes the world and moon go round. Reaching for the Moon is an absorbing, insightful psychological drama with political overtones which won an OutFest Audience Award and is one of the year’s best movies about the love.

 

AFI 2012: SOMETHING IN THE AIR

A scene from Something in the Air.

The Dreamers outsiders

By Ed Rampell

We often label and lump the turmoil that swept America and the world with a series of assassinations, Civil Rights, the antiwar movement, Black Power, China’s Red Guard, the Prague Spring, feminism and so on under the broad rubric of “the ’60s.” Auteur Olivier Assayas’ Something in the Air sets the record straight, showing that the era’s radical fervor continued well into the 1970s.

The film follows the trajectory of a number of French youths as they wend their ways through the tumult of this insurgent hangover, when it seemed there was a world to be won. At the center is Gilles (Clement Metayer), a high school student whose life alternately intertwines with various friends, comrades and lovers like Laure (Carole Combes) and Christine (Lola Creton). Along the way is street fighting with the CRS/SS pigs; tossed Molotov cocktails; and the factional infighting that those who believe in “workers of the world unite” often specialize in. (It’s truly astonishing how people who profess solidarity frequently fight with one another, as if the revolution is their private property.) Air chronicles the faction fights between various leftwing tendencies -- anarchists, Maoists and what the subtitles unfortunately refer to as “Trotskyites.” (To use a racial analogy, this is akin to using the “N” word to describe adherents of Leon Trotsky, denigrating them as fifth columnist saboteurs. Whereas “Trotskyist” is a respectful term like “African American” is; it simply refers to followers of the Bolshevik apostle of world and permanent revolution. Two demerits for counterrevolutionary nomenclature, comrade translator!)

Along with extremist leftist ideology, youth of that generation also grew their hair long and contended with the counterculture’s bohemian influences in the form of drugs; Rock music (Something in the Air has a good period soundtrack); psychedelic light shows; underground newspapers; etc. There is even a strain of mysticism, as Jean-Pierre (Hugo Conzelmann) and Leslie (India Salvor Menuez), an American diplomat’s daughter, make the journey to the East, seeking enlightenment and what Leslie calls “the sacred dance.” Did any other revolutionary generation have to deal with such intense alternate lifestyle stimulus and choices?

Gilles, an aspiring artist, manages to keep his cool and not lose his head by pursuing painting and then filmmaking. An independent thinker, Gilles takes both his screenwriter father and a collective of militant moviemakers (a la Jean-Luc Godard during that period) to task for the same cinematic sin: Bourgeois pictures. Gilles criticizes the latter for using conventional film forms to try and render revolutionary subject matter and consciousness to the masses, which reduces their artistry (or lack of) to trite sloganeering. As Gilles pursues his destiny, does the not so proletarian protagonist sell out in the end?

The gifted Assayas also directed 1994’s Cold Water (a sort of forerunner to Air); 1996’s Irma Vep; a segment of the 2006 omnibus film Paris Je T’Aime; and the riveting 333-minute Carlos, about the ultra-left hit man, which flew by without a dull moment.

Something in the Air is, of course, a feature film with actors, Assayas’ script, production values, etc., yet it is among the best chronicles -- fictional or nonfiction -- of that heady heyday of radicalism and the young revolutionaries who tried, albeit imperfectly, to change the world for the better. Although I of course had nothing to do whatsoever with this work and grew up in New York, not near Paris, Something in the Air is probably the closest thing I’ve seen onscreen to “my” own biography. Indeed, on the exact day I left America to pursue my destiny (I’m still waiting, BTW) in the South Seas, Chairman Mao died.

In any case, if you weren’t alive or of age then to experience those days of rage and hope, when world revolution seemed imminent, the highly recommended Something in the Air will vividly, brilliantly bring that era alive for you. And if you did participate in that period when for a brief moment all things seemed possible, you can relive them during this movie masterpiece that helps us to remember when we were able, perchance, to dream.


Something in the Air screens Nov. 2, 7 p.m. Chinese 1 Theater; Nov. 4, 4:30 p.m. Chinese 5 Theater.