SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL, HIGHWAY 61 Primal Screen Festival, 7Arts, Johannesburg
IN a story that sounds apocryphal but isn’t, Sympathy for the Devil director Jean Luc Godard whacked his producer Iain Qaurrier on the nose, on the stage of the National Film Theatre in November 1968 on the occasion of the film’s London Film Festival premiere. The reason for this outburst was manifold: the British censors had banned the film, Qaurrier had recut the final sequence of the film (for the better, I think) without Godard’s say-so, and Godard didn’t like the well-scrubbed festival audience.
It was a revolutionary film, after all. So Godard advised the audience to leave the auditorium and watch the film projected on a wall by Waterloo bridge on a portable 16mm Eiki, plugged into a cable led from the offending theatre’s power supply.
Godard’s intention in the film, shot in Britain, was to show how mankind soils everything it most values, from literature to sex to children. Startling imagery abounds from the intoning of vaguely pornographic, vaguely Mills and Boon trash to an audience of blank intelligence to the “killing” of white girls by Black Panthers in an automobile graveyard adjoining Battersea power station.
This particular sequence is fraught with meaning: the girls are placid. Dressed in white nighties and barefooted they look like they have wandered in from The Story of O mixed with Alice in Wonderland. When they are “butchered”, the blood is patently red paint and their attitudes are knowingly pre- Raphaelite.
Intercut with the various sequences are the Rolling Stones, rehearsing, again and again, their song “Sympathy for the Devil” — a liturgy from the Prince of Darkness to the children of Adam, claiming his feats of being “around when Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt and pain” and killing the Kennedys, with the help of mankind. The meaning is clear: man has made the same mistakes throughout history and repetition, as in the repetition of the song may define the actions but can never iron out the predestined brutal nature of humanity.
The devil also appears in the road movie Highway 61, made by Canada’s answer to Gus van Sandt, Bruce McDonald. Highway 61 runs all the way from Canada to New Orleans, passing through Hibbing, Minnesota, the teenage home of Bob Dylan, Memphis, the home of Elvis, the Mississippi Delta, the home of the Blues and on to the birthplace of jazz, New Orleans.
In McDonald’s film an untalented trumpeter-cum-barber called Pokie from a Canadian backwater teams up with an amoral female roadie and heads down the highway transporting a coffin on the roof, containing the final remains of the roadie’s supposed brother, plus a plastic pipe containing a lot of cocaine. Down the highway they go, pursued by a self-styled Satan intent on claiming the corpse’s errant soul.
An immensely likable little movie, it is an easy ride containing a couple of classic moments. My favourite among these has the devil negotiating the sale of her soul with a deluded kindergarten superstar. Others include the devil winning a bingo competition held in a Mississippi church run by “The Smiler’s Society” and Pokie giving open-air haircuts to a Mississippi chapter of the Hell’s Angels.
* The Primal Screen Film Festival ends on Sunday. Sympathy for the Devil is screened tonight (August 19) at 8pm and on August 22 at 9pm; Highway 61 has its final screening tonight at 10pm.
Trevor Steele Taylor
SENTIMENTAL DRIVEL
WITH HONOR Director: Alex Keshishian
AMERICAN writer Gore Vidal plays a conservative professor, Pit Cannon, who is told exactly what freedom means by a down and outer, Simon (Joe Pesci). His tirade would be a good joke if this were a better movie.
One of Cannon’s students, Monty (Brendan Fraser), meets Simon when he drops his thesis down the grid of a boiler room where the penniless Simon lives happily. Monty unwillingly befriends Simon, who proves to be an eccentric, wise old man of the streets who teaches Monty more than he’ll learn at university. So far, so good. But when the camera keeps lingering on snowscapes, when the soundtrack music swells just once too often, one starts to feel uncomfortable.
A theme that should have teeth and edge, be tough-minded and funny, gets sentimental, especially about being homeless which, for me, is dubious because the movie’s really getting sentimental about life in the gutter, and living there’s not much fun, I think.
Pesci is irritating as Simon — he should be kept away from comedy, even with a serious edge. Fraser manages a performance that, I guess, you could call “uplifting” but that’s exactly right for this movie which is all about how great being poor and without money is for everyone who wants … well, upliftment and to live in a perpetual state of moral tumescence.
Fabius Burger