What with recent documentaries about Led Zeppelin, Sly Stone, Janis Ian and others, it feels like we are in something of an early to mid-1970s musical time warp—a not-unappealing idea furthered by three more features arriving this week. Given that they star John & Yoko, Neil Young, and Pink Floyd, you might be forgiven for wondering if our current epoch is really just a delusional sidebar to one epic acid flashback. If only, right?
Probably no rock musician has been more involved with movies, or so strictly on his own terms, than Young. His first directorial feature Journey Into the Past came out 52 years ago, and it was typical in being a highly idiosyncratic mix of elements from performance footage to experimental noodling. Since then he’s released numerous concert films, some of the best directed by others (including illustrious names like Jonathan Demme, Hal Ashby and Jim Jarmusch); handcrafted a couple eccentric musical narratives (Human Highway, Greendale); and occasionally acted.
In the new Coastal, he hands the camera reins over to spouse Daryl Hannah, who had already directed him in 2018’s ill-received quasi-sci-fi Paradox, which she also wrote, as well as a couple documentaries. No one of Young’s stature has archived their career quite so thoroughly in audiovisual terms, with results that are sometimes good-to-terrific, sometimes just, well, “for fans only,” to put it politely.
Coastal falls into that latter camp. It’s not bad, just unnecessary—a B&W record of a solo West Coast tour in which his amiable banter and increasingly fragile voice just about put across a half-dozen or so songs spanning many decades, before adoring audiences. But there’s also a lot of boring footage on the customized tour bus, in which Young chats with driver Jerry Don Borden. You have to love Neil Young (which I do) to sit through this uninspired souvenir from his 2023 one-man shows. Even then, it’s not exactly essential viewing. Still, if you’re fond of the guy, seeing him still moderately rock the house at age 77 may be reward enough. Coastal plays theaters nationwide on Thurs/17, with some venues also showing it on additional dates; for locations and other info, go here.
The kind of home-movie intimacy Young and Hannah are purveying is irrelevant to Pink Floyd at Pompeii, a newly restored version of a film first released in 1972. Documentarian Adrian Maben proposed shooting the British band in the ruins of an ancient Roman amphitheater. They played live, but without spectators, and the performances were shot over six days’ course. The half dozen or so songs are each given their own visual strategy, which encompasses psychedelia and some enigmatic posturing but doesn’t approach the silly play-acting of Zep’s later Song Remains the Same.
It was a very effective music-on-film piece without a single spoken word—but as it was barely past an hour long, it later got padded with brief interviews and scenes of the quartet recording their next album, the ginormously successful Dark Side of the Moon. The current release includes that added material, plus of course up-to-the-moment enhancement of visual and sonic elements. In part because of its conceptual nature, Pompeii remains an almost perfect miniature, at once a time capsule and something out of time entirely. It releases to IMAX and regular theaters (including SF’s Roxie, Metreon and 4-Star) nationwide on Thurs/24, playing further dates at select venues. For locations and showtimes, go here.
Though it has generous excerpts—including “Come Together,” “Mother” and “Imagine”—from the only full-length concert Lennon did post-Beatles, One to One: John & Yoko is less of a concert film than either of the features above. Instead, Kevin Macdonald’s documentary is a sort of mosaic using the 18 months when rock’s most famous couple first moved to NYC as a framework to view a particular roilsome period in US history. Inhabiting a humble Greenwich Village apartment (before departing to the greater privacy of the upscale Dakota), they dove into political activity at its counterculture peak. Lennon wrote songs in support of political prisoners and the antiwar movement; he and Yoko Ono developed close activist alliances with Jerry Rubin, Allan Ginsberg and others.
Societal “revolution” still seemed within reach. But the archival materials Macdonald draws on (in addition to the couple’s own audio and film records) contextualize that hope within a stubbornly conservative, capitalistic America that wasn’t about to surrender turf without a fight. We catch glimpses of police brutality at protests, Nixon’s landslide reelection (despite the growing specter of Watergate), Vietnam War escalation, TV’s endless advocacy for vapid materialism, et al. Meanwhile, John was being threatened with deportation, Yoko remained cast in popular opinion as the destroyer of Beatles, and the duo were trying to regain contact with her daughter from a prior marriage.
This phase in their lives culminated in a starry 1972 benefit concert for a miserably underfunded and understaffed institution serving “mentally retarded” children, from which the performance sequences here were taken. Though occasionally it seems over-digressive, One to One does vividly capture a moment when musicians were very much part of the dialogue in another period of extreme national political division. Already playing on some IMAX screens, the film opens in regular theaters this Fri/18, go here for more info.
Politicized Lives: ‘The Teacher,’ ‘The President’s Wife’
Politics are more than just a passion or pasttime for the protagonists in two very different new imported features. By far the weightier among them is Farah Nabulsi’s The Teacher, which opens at the Roxie this Fri/18. Saleh Bakri from The Band’s Visit and The Blue Caftan plays Basem, an English instructor at a Palestinian boys’ school. Like nearly all his colleagues, neighbors and students, he has suffered dire loss as a result of Israeli occupation. When local boy Adam (Muahammad Abed Elrahman) sees his home destroyed, then a relative killed by a malicious settler, the teacher’s paternal influence barely holds him back from committing some reckless act of revenge. But Basem is also secretly involved in dangerous intrigue that involves a captured IDF soldier being used to negotiate release for a thousand Palestinian political prisoners.
Nabulsi’s writing-directing debut is a forceful drama that is well-acted and well-crafted. But despite a few slow passages in its two-hour length, it ultimately seems a bit overloaded with issues and plot strands, which also include a worried older visiting American couple (Stanley Townsend, Andrea Irvine) and a British volunteer counselor (Imogen Poots) who eventually strikes romantic sparks with Basem. That last element in particular feels like a gratuitous concession to foreign audiences. Despite those flaws, however, The Teacher does powerfully convey the comingled exhaustion and stubborn resistance of long-term conflict with a nation that has the courts and military on its side.
Almost frivolous by comparison is Lea Domenach’s The President’s Wife, another belated US release (both it and The Teacher premiered in 2023) from a first-time feature writer-director. “Loosely based on the life of Bernadette Chirac,” as opening text announces, it has the venerable Catherine Deneuve as that lady. As depicted here, introduced in 1995 at age 63, she has long been an engine driving her ambitious husband Jacques’ (Michel Vuillermoz) political ascendency. But when he finally gets elected President of France, she’s appalled to find that condescending ingrate shunting her into the background, refusing her entree to the corridors of power while he makes poor decisions (including ones around marital fidelity). Eventually with the help of a media-savvy flunky (Denis Podalydes), she gets revenge by creating her own refreshed public image, potentially even eclipsing his own.
Wife (newly retitled from Bernadette) recalls Oliver Stone’s W. in being a satire of still reasonably fresh political events that isn’t quite barbed enough to draw blood, and ultimately seems too lightweight a treatment for the events and issues involved. It’s amusing enough, with a bag of tricks that includes chorus-sung narration. But the somewhat forced high spirits are dulled a bit by a broad comedy tone, and by star miscasting. Now 81, Deneuve can pass for two decades younger. But her matronly placidity is more inexpressive, her sense of humor more elusive than ever. This too-mild depiction of spiky real-world personalities needed an actress capable of making bottled-up resentment furiously palpable—and funny. Instead, it has Deneuve gliding through like a chic parade float, dignified but imperturbable. The President’s Wife opens Fri/18 at SF’s Opera Plaza Cinemas.
