Category: Music

Elvis

Rated: MElvis

Directed by: Baz Luhrmann

Screenplay by: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner

Story by: Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner

Produced by: Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick and Schuyler Weiss.

Executive Producers: Toby Emmerch, Courtenay Valenti and Kevin McCormick

Starring: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh.

‘What about you Mr. Presley, are you ready to fly?’

Written and directed by Baz Luhrmann (The Great Gatsby (2013), Moulin Rouge! (2001), Strictly Ballroom (1992), Australia (2008), William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)), Elvis is a biopic told from the perspective of infamous manager, Colonel, the Snowman, Tom Parker (Tom Hanks).

Colonel Parker learnt how to shake a dollar from a punter while leaving a smile on their face working in a carnival.

When he saw Elvis (Austin Butler) perform, he knew all his Christmases had come at once.

And boy, could he make it snow.

The film has a heady introduction with cuts back and forth from glaring signs and bluesy music to revival tents and the young Elvis shaking those legs.

Elvis didn’t know why the girls in the audience were screaming, until a bandmate tells him, ‘The girls want to see you wiggle.’

Austin, who sang a lot of the songs himself, is so fresh it was like getting to know the superstar all over again.  To admire the rise of this smalltown kid to become, The King.

‘That boy from Memphis,’ was put in the back of a police car after starting riots because of the way he moved on stage.

Elvis literally changed the world, embracing black America back in times of segregation while the Colonel turned his fame into a money-making machine: merchandise, records, movies, concerts, sponsors and then to the bright lights of Los Vegas.

The Colonel knew every trick in the book and then invented new ways to make money.  As long as Elvis would keep getting up on stage.

In the end, we all know, it’s a sad story, but the telling is exhilarating.

There’s risk not only in making a film about the most famous person in the world, but then changing up the music, so the soundtrack has remixes from the likes of Eminem, Doja Cat and Denzel Curry.

There’s a combination of the blues from B. B. King and Little Richard, Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton with revival music and rap so there’s an edge to the tone of the movie.

And that flash back and forth, to time stamps becoming part of the scene to cartoon add to the pace only to stop in close-up of the smoky blue of Elvis’ eyes.

Has to be said, Austin’s great as Elvis.  What an undertaking.

There’re cuts to Elvis himself and the heart still skips a beat.

What is it about this guy?!

He’s Elvis.  He’s, The King.

 

The Audition (Das Vorspiel)

Directed by: Ina WeisseThe Audition (Das Vorspiel)

Written by: Daphne Charizani (screenplay), Ina Weisse (screenwriter)

Produced by: Pierre-Olivier Bardet, Felix von Boehm

Starring: Nina Hoss, Simo Abkarian, Serafin Mishiev, Ilja Monti.

Viewed in German with English subtitles (released as part of the German Film Festival).

“I’m sorry it’s all so complicated right now.”

The Audition follows Anna (Nina Hoss): a violinist, a teacher, a wife and a mother.

She watches young Alexander (Ilja Monit) audition for tutorage at the school where she teaches.  She sees talent. She wants him to be her student.

We watch Anna with her husband, a French violin maker, Philippe (Simon Abkarian).  He loves her.  He understands her, her discomfort, anxiety.  He doesn’t mind swapping tables, swapping plates.

He knows something is wrong just by listening to her play violin.

At first, The Audition feels like it’s about the music, about the protégée, Alexander.  A protégée, but also a replacement for Anna’s lack of success on stage.

But this is a nuanced film that explores the slow twist of relationships to what really matters to Anna: the desperation to succeed.  Her son’s need of a mother’s love.  A mother’s need for her son’s attention.

This is a film about the effect of a son pulling away from his mother.  How it turns her life to seek fulfillment from an affair with another man.  To see her ambition projected onto her young student so she pushes and pushes, eventually setting her own son up in competition against her protégée, Alexander.

This is about how she seeks comfort from the warmth of a hairdryer blown under her jumper.

But more than from her son or lover or husband, Anna needs fulfillment because something’s missing.

The more I write the more I understand the slow reveal of this character, Anna: her mother dying when she was young.  Her father tough with his life lessons.

It’s a carefully constructed narrative, a character study set to the sound of the violin.

This is a bittersweet piece of a person’s life: her successes, her failures and ultimately her need above all else.

It’s a slow burn with layers of music and the language about music, but it’s the undercurrent that’s shown in a look or gesture, the unspoken that speaks the loudest – that’s what the film is really about.

The Audition is a difficult movie to review because it’s a subtle one, a cerebral thought-provoker and a film I’ve enjoyed pulling apart and thinking about after the credits have rolled, almost more than the actual viewing.

Fisherman’s Friends

Rated: MFisherman's Friends

Directed by: Chris Foggin

Written by: Piers Ashworth, Meg Leonard, Nick Moorcroft

Produced by: Meg Leonard, Nick Moorcroft, James Spring

Music by: Rupert Christie

Cinematography by: Simon Tindall

Starring: Daniel Mays, James Purefoy, David Hayman, Dave Johns, Sam Swainsbury, Tuppence Middleton and Joel Clarke.

‘Never under any circumstances say, “Rabbit”.’

Revelling in Port Isaac for Henry’s (Christian Brassington) stag weekend, the London boys, Danny (Daniel Mays), Driss (Vahid Gold) and music exec and boss, Troy (Noel Clarke) are ready for some larger and yachting.  Until they end up stranded at sea and getting ‘quite burnt’.

It’s up to the local Search And Rescue to fish to them to safety.  Ironic being the crew are the local fishermen.

It’s like two different worlds collide: the city boys who own country estates and work for a record label and fishermen who risk their lives every day and sing sea shanties.

When the London boys come across their rescuers singing in the town square, boss Troy thinks it’ll be hilarious tasking Danny with signing the group to their label.  Only for Danny to see more than just crusty fishermen signing, he hears history in their voices.

‘What’s that song?’ Danny asks Alwyn (Tuppence Middleton), the daughter of man-of-few-words, the words never wrong, Jim (James Purefoy) – ‘That’s the rock’n’roll of 1752.’

Based on a true story, Fisherman’s Friends is about the discovery of these ten men, and the journey from singing to raise money for the village Lifeboat Association to a million pound record deal with Universal Music, a top-ten album and playing the Pyramid stage at the world famous Glastonbury Festival.

But there’s more to these crusty sailors than a fine set of pipes.  There’s the history, the proud Cornwell folk defining those on this side of the river Tamar, and them on the other side – like the emmets (the Cornish word for ants): those who come across and are a pain to get rid of.

There’s some PG humour that doesn’t get too carried away, to keep the boat floating along the storyline – see what I did there?  Yep, that’s me getting carried away with the nautical theme because I enjoyed the ride, damn it.

The film reminded me of the songs we’d sing in primary school (What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor included) and dancing to folk music with kids from other local schools.  And the gymkhana with the bag pipes and dog jumping competition.

It reminded me about community and generations of families buried in the same cemetery and knowing a place.  Really knowing a place and people knowing you.

So rather than the underdogs winning and signing to that record label, there’s thought to place and where we stand in it and being able to take a man by his own merit.  Including Jago (David Hayman), Port Isaac’s number one bingo caller.  Bless him.

So yeah, I got a little swept away in the story.

And the guys did a good with the singing, no ‘taking the piss’ required.

Pavarotti

Rated: MPavarotti

Directed by: Ron Howard

Produced by: Ron Howard

Written by: Marc Monroe

Featuring: Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, José Carreras, Bono.

Before even the first images appear, the cinema is filled with the chittering and warbling of birdsong, and I can only suppose that some kind parallel with Pavarotti’s voice is being drawn. In fact, when the vision comes up, I find myself swooping over the Amazon jungle looking down at the serpentine loops of the river.

As Pavarotti’s story unfolds, director and producer, Ron Howard, not only ushers us behind the scenes, but invites us onstage and even takes us on the road with the maestro. While Luciano Pavarotti may have been born with, ‘One of the most clearest and passionate voices, heaven on earth,’ it took a very earthly degree of physical exertion to fill an entire concert hall with a single voice. Without a microphone. Without an amplifier. And certainly, without speakers.

Despite a long induction emulating his father’s singing, Pavarotti initially qualified as an elementary school teacher. The decision to take on the long training to become a tenor was an enormous leap of faith, ‘You don’t become well-known in a day. You don’t know your destiny’.

According to his wife Adua Veroni, Pavarotti was not a person who ever planned things and that was certainly the case for his international debut. He took the stage as a stand-in playing opposite Joan Sutherland, but was more than a lucky break. Pavarotti was in awe and he believed that Sutherland’s breathing technique allowed him to become a serious professional. During a rehearsal, Sutherland invited him to feel the muscles in her diaphragm. Much to Pavarotti’s amazement, they were responding, even before Sutherland had sung a single note.

For the operatic tenor, the high C is the epitome, but it is not a natural range in the way a bass or baritone is and to achieve the fluency that makes it seem effortless requires more than talent. So, when Pavarotti performed nine high Cs, he created opera history. Likening it to horse jumping, when the Maestro of the High C was asked whether he knew he would be able to reach the note, he replied with a contrary smile: ‘No. That is the beauty of my profession’.

According to Placido Domingo, the art of the opera singer is to share the emotion of each particular word: ‘If you pronounce it well you get the rhythm immediately.’  For Pavarotti, it was a matter of technique: ‘You measure your breath’. The public will not know what you are doing, but they will feel it. But, for all of the art and the artifice, Pavarotti’s wife felt that he was so suited to his operatic repertoire because he was a ‘bumpkin’ at heart.

Then again, his eight-year-old daughter described her father as a thief, because he went to work each night with a suitcase full of fake moustaches and beards. For Pavarotti, ‘the opera is something fake that little by little becomes true’.

On camera Pavarotti seemed so confident and cavalier, but behind the scenes, before every performance, Pavarotti would lament, ‘I go to die.’ According to José Carreras, ‘The voice is a demanding mistress, anything will affect it’.

In his later years, Pavarotti performed with many contemporary musicians. While the focus is on his unlikely friendship with Princess Diana and Bono, he also performed with Elton John and Lou Reed among many others.

Little by little, Howard builds a lifelike portrait of an extraordinary life, but his documentary, overflowing with texture and detail, still cannot cram it all in.

The Eulogy

Rated: MThe Eulogy

Directed and Edited by: Janine Hosking

Produced by: Janine Hosking, Katey Grusovin, Trish Lake

Music Performed by: Geoffrey Tozer

Featuring: The Honourable Paul Keating, Richard Gill AO

I don’t know about you, but for me a film titled, The Eulogy does not sound like easy viewing. In this instance, though, the story behind the eulogy is so improbable that it has been described as sounding like, ‘A Story someone might have made up in a pub’.

The documentary opens as ex-prime minister Paul Keating delivers a fiery eulogy hailing classical pianist Geoffrey Tozer the musical prodigy Australia shunned. Keating is incensed and his eulogy is both an ode to the soaring beauty of Tozer’s music and an excoriating rebuke to a mediocre and mean-spirited arts establishment who shut him out. Keating lashes out at them as, ‘A cottage industry in nastiness’.

If Tozer was the extraordinary talent described by his peer, internationally lauded concert pianist Arthur Rubinstein, ‘Possibly the finest pianist of the twentieth century’, why has his memory been virtually expunged from the national consciousness? Music educator and conductor Richard Gill AO has set himself a mission to find out. Was Tozer a prodigy? And if he was, Gill asks:

‘What. Went. Wrong?’

The first hint that Tozer might be the virtuoso that Keating claims is a cutaway to a concert pianist in the opening scenes: fingers dance so lightly across the keys, releasing a rapturous cascade of music. Gill’s students listening in, describe the subtlety of the touch, every note in the performance ‘en pointe’, but none recognise the musician.

Gill’s search for the life story of this neglected artist begins in a trim and freshly painted backyard shed, a miniature museum as part of Tozer’s estate, filled with letters, journals, drawings and photographs. While, at the same time as he sifts through the artefacts, Gill also ponders the nature of genius. Speaking to his students, he notes: ‘Originally prodigy was linked to omens and the foretelling of monstrous events, but now it has come to mean a special gift.’

Certainly, Tozer’s genius was not difficult to identify in his early years. At the age of thirteen, he became the youngest ever recipient ever of the Winston Churchill Fellowship and he made his debut on the international stage at the age of fifteen, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 15 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Although, by the time he was thirty two, Tozer was eking out an existence by teaching part-time at St Edmunds College in Canberra.

It was there that Paul Keating met and befriended him. Keating was at the St Edmunds Christmas recital to watch his son, but Tozer’s performance stole his breath away. Their meeting, the beginning of an enduring friendship, would eventually see a, ‘Prime Minister so passionately avenge the death of a musician’.

Not only does, The Eulogy offer a unique glimpse into the genesis of prodigy, Richard Gill’s quest contains all the ingredients of a decent mystery story, with Tozer’s playing a sublime counterpoint and his, Medtner Concerto Number One an epiphany for the senses.

Amazing Grace

Rated: GAmazing Grace

Realised and Produced by: Alan Elliott

Feature-Film Director: Sydney Pollack

Original Album Produced by: Aretha Franklin, Arif Mardin, Jerry Wexler

Originally Recorded Live At: The New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, Los Angeles.

A documentary filmed in 1972, Amazing Grace is the recording of Aretha Franklin singing in The New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, Los Angeles, a live recording that became the highest selling album of her career and the most popular Gospel album of all time.

The footage was never released because the sound couldn’t be synchronized – in the documentary, Reverend James Cleveland actually says, ‘Give the technician a big hand for the difficult.’

But without clappers or marks to guide the sound to sync with the video, Sydney Pollack, the original director, was unable to release the film.

Until now.

With digital technology, Alan Elliott, Jerry Wexler, and Pollack were able to match the sound to picture to make the documentary out of raw footage.

Recorded over two nights, the documentary gives a backstage pass back in time, and it feels like it with the 70s style, sweaty faces and running glitter.

The filming itself is basic with out-of-focus shots that slowly clear to tears and joy and crew in the background – it’s all so very raw but somehow that step back in time has given the film something else.

What the album doesn’t have is seeing that choir sing, to see the audience cry and fall in the aisle at the purity of Aretha’s voice.

‘She can sing anything,’ explains Rev James Cleveland.

And there’s nothing wrong with the sound.

I kept having to remind myself this was all recorded live.  This is what Aretha’s voice actually sounds like, the soul of it so clear on the faces appreciating the moment in the church.

There’s real joy here.  The glow felt through the screen, making me smile, making me feel something glow.

I was smiling all through the film.  This blurry, badly shoot film.

And, there’s a story.

What you don’t get from the album is the fear you can see in Aretha’s eyes.

This is a recording of an album that opens a door to Aretha’s life.  She wanted to go back and sing the songs from her childhood where she sang gospel at New Bethel Baptist Church where her father was a minister.

And her father makes an appearance in the documentary, speaking to Aretha, to the church.  It’s like her past and present come together.  No wonder she looks nervous.

Added to her performance is the effortlessness of the musicians – the piano playing like breathing, the bass playing in the intermission, the choir director, Alexander Hamilton keeping the whole performance together – shots of the singers in the choir from side-on to see the voice issue from their hearts.  And Rev Cleveland introducing the audience to the church, keeping the vibe cool, keeping it real, keeping it together while singing his spirit.  I just couldn’t help but love the guy.

This is the footage that’s been buried for decades.

To hear and see Aretha issue that ‘stone’ voice, it’s sanctified.

And one of those experiences where you wish you were there – with this documentary, you get a taste.

Mystify Michael Hutchence

Rated: MA15+Mystify Michael Hutchence

Directed by: Richard Lowenstein

Written by: Richard Lowenstein

Produced by: Maya Gnyp, John Battsek, Sue Murray, Mark Fennessy, Richard Lowenstein, Lynn-Maree Milburn, Andrew De Groot

Executive Producer: Maiken Baird

Music by: INXS, Michael Hutchence, Ollie Olsen, Max Q, Kylie Minogue & Nick Cave, Olafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm.

With a noted very special thank you to: Tiger Hutchence – Geldof.

Michael Hutchence: ‘The trouble is hanging on to a fixed point long enough to understand it.’

I grew up with INXS, clearly remembering watching Michael Hutchence on TV performing on stage at Wembley Stadium (leading to their album, Live Baby Live) and feeling something stir.

Like the rest of the world, I saw that Michael had that something.

What this documentary shows is that Michael wanted to be more than a pop star.  He wanted fame.  And he wanted to be an artist.

Usually I’m scribbling notes and at times drifting during a screening, thinking of a phrase to write.  But I was absorbed into this documentary because there was so much footage of Michael.  Those eyes.  That heart.

Director and writer, Richard Lowenstein knew INXS and Michael personally, directing most of their music videos and the film, Dogs in Space (1986) with Michael starring as the lead (and part of my, If you Haven’t Watched You’re in for a Treat, List).

Lowenstein notes, ‘There finally came a time when I felt that the hype had calmed down and enough time had passed for someone who had known him well and respected that relationship, to physically and emotionally tell a genuine and respectful chronicle of his life.

That’s when the interviews began.’

The documentary is made up of footage of Michael taken by family and friends and himself with voice-overs from those who were close to him – Kylie Minogue tries to explain their intimate relationship admitting it was exactly what it seemed, the dark and worldly Michael introducing Kylie to the sensory delights.

And we witness his relationship with super model Helena Christensen, as they gallivanted around the South of France, living the dream.

Early girlfriend and long-time close friend, Michele Bennett and Helena had never spoken publicly about Michael, until being interviewed for this film.

Michele Bennett, Kylie Minogue, Susie and Kell Hutchence (Michael’s parents), Tina Hutchence, Rhett Hutchence (sister and brother) and ‘Ghost Pictures have opened up their extensive archive of never-before-seen personal 35mm, 16mm and home video for this film. Many other informants and sources have supplied photographs, sound recordings and rare documents seen for first time.’

It was so easy to think Michael was just this superficial, sexy guy.  But the story of his life, in this documentary at least, depicts a sensitive dreamer who worked hard.  Who made the band INXS his family.

I thoroughly enjoyed seeing him alive and well in those early days, only to get my heart broken again by his ultimate suicide.  Yet, there’s answers here, which I appreciate as a fan.

Whether the film gives us insight into all that happened during Michael’s heady days, I’m not sure.  The band members weren’t given much of a voice but were shown alongside Michael, on stage, backstage.

What struck me was the revelation of the attack that occurred in 1992 in Copenhagen, when he was outside a pizza shop with Helena.  The traumatic brain injury (TBI) he suffered lead to a complete loss of his sense of smell and 90% of his sense of taste.  And he kept the injury a secret.

The later years of his life were buried in controversy after his relationship with Paula Yates became the London presses favourite topic.

All I remember from the time is the much-publicised divorce and custody battle Paula fought against Sir Bob Geldof, and the drug abuse of Paula and Michael.

Here, we’re shown the effect the controversy had on Michael while his condition took it’s toll, the symptoms from his TBI looking like the effects of drugs.

Michael says of life, ‘Sometimes it clicks and sometimes you’re fighting against nature.’

It was a pleasure to see, once again, the performance of Michael on stage and to see behind the scenes of this surprisingly shy man.

It’s a haunting documentary that satisfies the curiosity while breaking the heart.

Michael Hutchence: 1960 – 1997.

Wild Rose

Rated: MWild Rose

Directed by: Tom Harper

Written by: Nicole Taylor

Produced by: Faye Ward

Starring: Jessie Buckley, Sophie Okenedo, James Harkness, Jamie Sives and Julie Walters.

Wild Rose is a Glasgow county music film opening on Rose-Lynn’s last day, ‘in the jail’: she’s wild and free and ready to pick up her dream of becoming a country (not western) singer.

Three Cords and the Truth.

That’s what Rose-Lynn (Jessie Buckley) has tattooed on her forearm.

But like the tag on her ankle and the curfew she must keep while on probation, Rose-Lynn is tied-down with the responsibility having two kids, each born before she turned eighteen.

With the kids left with granny (Marion, played by Julie Walters) while she was put away for a year, it’s like she’s forgotten she’s a mother.

How is she going to get to Nashville and become a famous country singer and look after two kids?

I find there’s a particular darkness to these UK, character-driven films, like the cold of the place brings a heaviness with all the wooly jumpers and indoor living – not that Rose-Lynn was partial to jumpers, she was more about denim skirts and white cowboy boots.

Wild Rose has that same dry heaviness broken with golden light brought by this incredible voice from the bratful Rose-Lynn.  It brought tears to my eyes when she sang, every single time.  So by the end of the film the tears were streaming because what was heavy, turned into life-affirming.  Like the heaviness of everything else made her voice sound more pure.  Which is what country music is, I guess.

Which is something writer Nicole Taylor wanted to share, “The way the emotionality in it helps people open up, certainly in places such as Glasgow. I’m from Glasgow and all my life I’ve been obsessed with Country music. I think it’s popular in places and among people who are not used to talking about their feelings. Who might not even know their own feelings. But when they hear Country – which is raw and pure and unashamedly emotional – it’s a way to process things and have a cathartic experience [….] It’s a language for the emotionally inarticulate – and that’s Rose-Lynn!”

And Jessie Buckley was great for this role.

I could relate to the young lass and her Gallus behaviour (as the Glaswegians would say, meaning full of cheek, irrepressible, doesn’t care if she’s rude, but not in an obnoxious way).  Middle class and missing her youth, Susannah (Sophie Okenedo) employing Rose-Lynn as her ‘day woman’ (cleaner) introduces this torn and talented singer as light; like she’s a breath of fresh air.

But Rose-Lynn has been unlucky learning her life lessons.  Except for that voice.

And we see the affect her need, to use her talent instead of taking responsibility, has on her mother – the performance from Julie Walters has to be noted here, with that look of sadness, realisation and pride in her eyes.

It’s about this journey with the music used to show Rose-Lynn’s talent, what she was born to be, versus the responsibility of her choices, her kids and eventually her life.

So it’s more about Rose-Lynn learning what she really wants out of life and how her choices have landed her where she never saw coming while dreaming about where she thought she should be.

More family drama than expected but a solid story with some beautiful moments.

Matangi /Maya /M.I.A.

Rated: MA 15+Matangi /Maya /MIA

Directed: Stephen Loveridge

Featuring: Maya Arulpragasam

‘This is what happened to a kid whose dad ran off to be a terrorist:’ Life doesn’t turn out the same way as someone whose dad is a banker, a lawyer or a fireman.

Maya’s choice of words is interesting. Usually, it would be the other side using such highly coloured and provocative language to describe the man behind the Tamil Tiger resistance movement. Partisans might be expected to use terms such as liberator or freedom fighter.

Maya was eleven when her mother and her siblings fled the war zone in their native Sri Lanka, to resettle in the refugee enclave in London. Although, the family was warmly welcomed into the fold, life was still harsh. Maya felt as if she didn’t fit in anywhere: she was ‘shot at in Sri Lanka’ and ‘spat at in Britain’. Music was her consolation and she would drift off to sleep listening to British pop through her headphones. That was, until they were burgled. Maya could do nothing but watch as her radio was carried off to a neighbouring flat.

It might have been one of the lowest points in her life as she lay awake listening to the music spilling out from the flat across the way, but it was a turning point, too. Up until then music was Madonna and the Spice Girls, but when Maya heard her first hip hop beats it was an epiphany. She was listening to people with something to say, and hip hop was the way to say it.

While her sister was lamenting the lack of birthday and Christmas cards from their father, Maya found a source of strength and identity in his absence. Her father was fighting for ‘a human rights problem’, everything was ‘inhumane’ for the Tamils in Sri Lanka. ‘What he’s done to us, made us so strong. We are so independent. Fearless fighters.’ But, rather than taking up arms, Maya turned to documentary film making to express her activism.

Haunted by footage of a women her own age in the jungle armed with assault rifles, Maya returned to Sri Lanka hoping to reconnect with her extended family and find some answers: ‘How do women survive in the jungle’ just on a day-to-day practical level and ‘Why was it me that got away?’ Following that visit, MIA was born, and she released her debut album, Arula (named after her dad). A million copies were downloaded from Napster. ‘It happened so fast.’ Finally. MIA had a microphone, and there was no question she was going to use it.

Subversive and defiant, instead of ‘cookie cutter videos with beautiful girls’, MIA started out with a clip of, monkeys and the jungle, before moving on to exploits and video clips that would bring her both international stardom and notoriety. Because, ‘the worst thing they can do to you is make you irrelevant’.

Well, they can try …

But the woman who infamously flipped the bird to the audience during a half-time performance with Madonna at the Super Bowl in 2012 and the singer/songwriter of ‘Born Free’—a song that accompanies a deeply disturbing music clip where pale-skinned, red-haired boys are brutally hunted down by faceless military types clad in black body armour—will not be going quietly.

I Used To Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story

Rated: PGI Used To Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story

Directed by: Jessica Leski

Produced by: Jessica Leski, Rita Walsh

Featuring: Elif Cam, Sadia, Dara Donelly, Susan Bower.

Designed as a glimpse into a teenage girl’s sparkly, heart-studded, secret diary, this engaging documentary opens with black and white footage of girls who have flocked en masse for the smallest glimpse of The Beatles during their 1964 world tour. Like some curious kind of behaviour that David Attenborough might explain in a nature program, this knot of screaming, crying, hair-tearing, swooning girls is a phenomenon that had begun to sweep the globe, leaving many a parent and those not caught up in the frenzy utterly bemused.

But. Who are these girls and what has become of them?

In this cross-continental exploration, these questions are addressed through the lives of four very different women, from Susan Bower an Australian television producer, one of the original fangirls captured in the archival footage of the Beatles tour, to Elif Cam, a schoolgirl living in Long Island, New York whose obsession with One Direction has paralleled the five years it has taken the filmmakers to produce their own labour of love.

According to Elif, when One Direction perform ‘It’s like they’re singing to me, “You’re beautiful”.’ And, what young girl could resist a really cute boy looking deeply into her eyes and whispering her all of her heart’s desires, even before she is really aware she has them? While, Dara the more technically-minded Australian brand strategist couldn’t resist the allure of, ‘Five guys in the rain dancing in slow motion’.

Analysing her own longstanding and unshakeable attachment, Dara sets out a chart on an office-grade whiteboard to examine ‘Boyband Basics’.  There’s: ‘The mysterious one, the cute one, the sensible dad/older brother, the sexy one—shirt off—and the forgotten one.’ And, there are definitely, ‘No girlfriends, no brothers and no beards.’

In some quarters, boybands are seen as manufactured, manipulative and relatively unskilled. Given that only one boy in the band might even be able to play the guitar, it can be social suicide for the girls to reveal their secret passion. But, that is precisely the allure. It’s about the perfect boy. And, in a boyband, there’s a boy to match the dreams of every girl.

For Elif, the girl on a video that went viral when she cried uncontrollably at the thought of seeing One Direction, ‘They’re not even like human beings. Nobody can be that perfect’. And, it seems that for all of the girls, the most perfect thing about the perfect boy is that he is unattainable.

At a time in their lives when girls are starting to feel the first flutterings of interest in boys, when their emotions are wayward with wild crushes galore, and at a time when real boys ‘are jerks’, boybands offer unconditional love. They sing of love and tantalise with hints of sex, but it is never overt. They are the boys who will never break your heart.

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