Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenburg
[info headline="Release date"]7 December 2018[/info]
[info headline="Language"]English, Hindi[/info]
[info headline="IMDb Rating"]7.4[/info]
[info headline="Genre"]Drama, Fantasy, Science Fiction[/info]
[info headline="Cast"]truong van , Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson[/info]
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"I've been called a witch, a slut, and a murderer.
Maybe people confuse me with the characters I play in films ... like I'm an
empty vessel onto which they project their fantasies and their shortcomings,
but I don't need to settle scores. I'm reclaiming my soul. I write as a woman
searching for another adventure."
Thus begins Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill’s documentary
“Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg.” Scarlett Johansson provided the
voice-over, reading from an unpublished memoir written by
model-actress-artist-icon Anita Pallenberg. Found by her children after her
death in 2017, the words contained "will anger the lawyers,” she wrote. If
only the rest of the documentary lived up to the vibrant voice Pallenberg
established for herself.
Like any number of recent bio-docs, the filmmakers use
archival footage, film clips, photographs, and interviews with those who knew
her, including director Volker Schlöndorff, her children Marlon and Angela, and
even Keith Richards himself, to craft a surface-level reassessment of
Pallenberg’s life. An audio clip from similarly sidelined icon Marianne
Faithful states, "Neither of us wanted to be with them because we wanted
their power. We had our own power." Yet, the documentary mostly anchors
Pallenberg’s life around her time with The Rolling Stones.
A quick blast to the past sets up Pallenberg’s youth as a
self-described “wild child” who grew up with conservative Italian-German
parents who lost everything during WWII. This prelude tells us how deeply her
childhood during the war affected her behavior. Still, this thread is abandoned
later in the doc, aside from one assertion that she and Richards understood
each other because they were both children during the war.
The rest of the documentary follows her whirlwind life after
coming to America in 1963 and befriending the downtown art scene, which
included Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Allen Ginsberg. “I loved the feeling of
culture exploding,” she says about her time in New York City. We get a laundry
list of miscellaneous jobs she performed without much exploration of exactly
what she hoped to express as an artist.
Instead, we get a very detailed re-telling of how she met
the Rolling Stones and fell in love with Brian Jones, whom she described as her
"doppelganger.” This was a mutually destructive, co-dependent relationship
filled with drugs (and eventually violence) from Jones. This section of her
life is illustrated with heaps of archival material that adds a cool sheen to
everything, smoothing over its lack of any actual substance.
One of the few times we learn anything about Pallenberg as
an artist comes from director Schlöndorff’s stories of making “Degree of
Murder” with her. This then transitions into a wonderful discussion of her
larger-than-life talent as “The Great Tyrant” in the camp classic “Barbarella.”
Of all the talking heads, Schlöndorff appears to be the only one interested in
who Pallenberg was as an artist and keeping that part of her legacy alive.
Of course, this is also the time in her life when her
relationship with Jones imploded; she found solace with Richards, who would be
her partner for the next decade, and also a brief fling with Mick Jagger while
they made Nicolas Roeg’s "Performance" together. And yes, it is
interesting that both "Gimme Shelter" and "You Can't Always Get
What You Want" were written about her. Still, the doc would have been
stronger if it interrogated how she felt about what she inspired rather than
dwelling on the salaciousness of it all.
Again, it proves just how deeply rooted this film is in
telling Pallenberg's story by who she was in relation to all these men. Despite
claiming otherwise in its marketing, this doc still wants to uphold her as the
rock n’ roll goddess of the headlines rather than as a person on her own terms.
Because we only get curated sections of her unpublished memories, which are few
and far between, it remains unclear how much of her memoir explores her wants,
desires, and inner thoughts. Did she write about her children? Did she write
about her artistic drive?
Worst of all, the most notorious stories from this period of
her life—her affair with Jagger, fleeing with Richards and their children to
Switzerland to avoid jail time for their illegal drug use, the death of their
third child, the “Deer Hunter” inspired death of Scott Cantrell—are all told
from an outsider's perspective. We never really get to know how these incidents
affected Pallenberg. We only glimpse her inner life in relation to her darkest
moment. On trying to kick her heroin addiction, Pallenberg wrote that she
"felt like some nasty person who caused death and destruction around
her." Up to this point, that’s all the doc has allowed her story to be.
She and Richards split for good in 1979, and Pallenberg was
finally able to get sober. Yet, although the film is titled "The Story of
Anita Pallenberg," it loses all interest in Pallenberg's life once her
story parallels that of the Stones. Even with a two-hour runtime, the
documentary reduces the last forty years of her life, in which she began
modeling again and returned to film acting, among other artistic pursuits, to a
cursory montage and some kind words from Kate Moss. Why is this part of her
life not worth true inclusion? Why do Bloom and Zill not deem it integral to
her story?
In a final piece of voiceover, Pallenberg says,
"Writing this [memoir] has helped me emerge in my own eyes." Too bad,
then, that her story has been filtered through eyes that still only see her as
a mess or a muse, not the complex, imperfect artist, mother, and woman she
really was.
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