THE HARD STUFF MULTIMEDIA
Dir: Alexis Bloom, Svetlana Zill
A film about Keith Richards’ ex-wife also gives a rare behind-the-curtains look at peak-time Stones.
"I was bursting with love for Anita,” Keith Richards recalls wistfully on the audio track to Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill’s highly engaging documentary portrait of Anita Pallenberg, the fast-living German-Italian beauty who became the blueprint for every bohemian rock-star muse to follow. Full of previously unseen material, including extensive private video footage from the Richards family archive, Catching Fire is a rare insight behind the scenes of the Rolling Stones at their debauched peak. It paints Pallenberg as an integral member of the band’s creative chemistry, amplifying their aristocratic glamour and satanic majesty. But the filmmakers also want to reclaim and re-frame Pallenberg from male-dominated rock mythology – not just a background figure in a junkie soap opera, but a smart, charismatic, influential counterculture figure in her own right.
Alongside audio interviews with Richards, Marianne Faithfull and others, Scarlett Johansson plays Pallenberg effectively, narrating extracts from her unpublished memoir. These juicy first-hand insights are a major selling point, and Johansson is a starry casting coup, although it seems strange to use her own American accent rather than approximating Pallenberg’s Euro-vamp growl. Marlon Richards, son of Keith and Anita, is an executive producer and on-screen interviewee, which helps explain the glittering treasure trove of rare photos and home videos here.
The film revisits some notorious incidents with an unsensational eyewitness tone: Pallenberg’s early romantic intoxication with her “twin”, Brian Jones, which soured into addiction and abuse; the fabled road trip to Morocco, when she effectively dumped Jones for Richards; her sexual entanglement with Mick Jagger while shooting the 1970 film Performance; the hair-raising drug busts and enforced exile that came to define what Richards calls the duo’s “Bonnie and Clyde” period; the gunshot death of Pallenberg’s teenage lover Scott Cantrell in 1979, apparently during a game of Russian roulette; and more.
Despite noble intentions to paint a fully rounded portrait of Pallenberg, who died in 2017, the filmmakers inevitably focus mostly on her Stones-muse years. Her post-rehab third act, especially her 90s reinvention as a London fashion student and self-spoofing Absolutely Fabulous icon, merits more than the perfunctory treatment it receives here, although at least Kate Moss gives welcome testimony as a late-career friend and champion. But whatever its blind spots, Catching Fire is still a classy, diligent and emotionally rich documentary. Not quite the Anita film we might want, but probably the one we need.
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