Nina Simone was a flinty, complex, exasperating woman and her life proves as riveting as her songs in the Liz Garbus-directed Netflix documentary "What Happened, Miss Simone?" which opened the Sundance Film Festival with "Bob" Redford in attendance. Redford unceremoniously took to the stage in the cavernous Eccles Theater but was nowhere near a mic as he began speaking; festival director John Cooper shouted at him like a pet owner until Redford ambled back to the podium. "He wanders," Cooper said, while Redford (who is starring in a film called "A Walk in the Woods" at this fest) made a plea for the importance of documentaries, which Sundance has indeed done much to advance.
The Simone film (which takes its title from a line by Maya Angelou) brings us to segregated 1940s North Carolina, where young Eunice Waymon was a piano prodigy, then to Atlantic City dives were Eunice discovered her singing was even more of an attraction than her playing, and became Nina. (She used a stage name because she didn't want her devout mother to know she was singing "the Devil's music.")
Managed by her husband, Andy, who quit his job in the NYPD to work for her, Simone became a celebrity singing torch songs in her slow, plaintive, resonant voice, but complained of being worked too hard after her daughter came along. Also, her husband beat her. He told her he thought she liked being beaten; she confessed to her diary that she had a love of physical violence.
Then the film lurches: Perhaps as a way of channeling her anger at being abused, Simone joined the protests over the terror bombing that killed four black girls at a Birmingham church, wrote and performed a protest song called "Mississippi Goddam" and suffered a concomitant loss of sales. She joined the Selma march, befriended Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and took a sharp, rageful turn into revolutionary politics, enjoining her audiences to "kill if necessary." Seemingly on a whim, she moved to Liberia (at the time the black separatist movement spoke longingly of mass reverse migration of black Americans to Africa), took her daughter over and then beat the poor child mercilessly. Following this interlude, she moved to Switzerland and then Paris, where she sang in clubs and dressed like a bag lady. It turned out she was manic depressive, but the treatment for her condition would cost her musical skill.
At times the film can be a little slow and repetitive, it trickles out in its closing minutes instead of finding a satisfying or emphatic ending and the overall glum mood isn't particularly agreeable. Still, the richness of Simone's cantankerous personality cries out for star treatment, and it's very easy to picture major directors as well as every black actress in the right age group being tantalized by this movie and its suitability for being remade as a narrative feature. This doc doesn't quite make Simone a tragic heroine, but it comes close enough that one can picture a great actress making the audience weep for how Simone was betrayed and then betrayed herself.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Nina Simone’s complex life riveting in new Netflix documentary
Dengan url
http://makananrasaenak.blogspot.com/2015/01/nina-simoneas-complex-life-riveting-in.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Nina Simone’s complex life riveting in new Netflix documentary
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Nina Simone’s complex life riveting in new Netflix documentary
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar