As the terms and bylaws that differentiate television and pic continue to erode,
the basic structural differences 'tween the album and the mix magnetic tape have all but
vanished with the tide. The last few years have seen critical attention turn away
from records with broad thematic arcs and toward the simpler idea of a collection of unrelated
songs. One inevitably only to look at the thoroughgoing output of Lil' Wayne bootlegs and
the beguiling popularity of mash-up creative person Greg Gillis (aka Girl Talk) to see that
the parts have progressively become more important than the total in recent years.
Julian Schnabel's engrossing newfangled documentary, Lou Reed's Berlin, is immediately at odds
with this mindset. Schnabel prefaces the film with his have interpretation of Lou
Reed's famous 1973 commercial failure, an record album, as he would have it, about "love's
obscure sisters: jealousy, rage, and loss". In reality, Berlin was the follow-up to
Reed's breakthrough album Transformer, a Bowie-aping glam rock juggernaut. But unlike its widely-loved,
commercially successful forerunner, Berlin made hooey at the cash register and was
received with interracial critical reaction. Today, many of Reed's most impassioned fans reckon
it his shining 60 minutes as a solo artist.
As Schnabel projects his short-film interpretation of the album's heroine Caroline
(played by the filmmaker's wife and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly actress Emmanuelle Seigner)
over the cramped stage, the former Velvet Underground frontman rips through the tunes
with a killer backing band that includes Alice Cooper's axe-man Steve Hunter and
bassist Fernando Saunders, not to mention The Brooklyn Youth Chorus. The set, culled
from Reed's three-night residency at Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse in 2006, too
features backing vocals by Antony Hagerty, of torch songsters Antony and the Johnsons,
and Sharon Jones, the conspicuous soul vocalizer who fronts R&B throwbacks the Dap-Kings. The
camera work, regard of the great Ellen Kuras (the films of Michel Gondry, N
eil Young: Heart of Gold), responds to the lyrical shifts in Reed's songs with a uncanny
swoon of grace. She gets as close as possible to the stoic legend, retreating only
when his peek promises an imminent lashing.
If Lou Reed's Berlin is a warm remembrance of the days when a great album was perpetually
superior to a capital single, it is too a bona fide concert film in a time of filmed
concerts. With the illustrious exceptions of the aforesaid Heart of Gold, Denis Hennelly
and Casey Suchan's staggering Rock the Bells, and, to a lesser extent, Martin Scorcese's
rumbustious Shine a Light, concerts on the big screen have get just that: Directionless
documents of bands playing their hits and nothing much more. Coupled with the thousands
of live clips uploaded to YouTube every week, the rare symbiosis of director and
live act seems all simply extinct. But Schnabel's pic is the real handle, a thoughtfully
prepared and enacted collaboration of visual style and auditory walking on air by 2 artists
world Health Organization, on the outset, await like they don't even have a species in common.
Like whatever good Deluxe Edition, Schnabel ends his film with two cuts not on Berlin: "Candy
Says" from White Light/White Heat and "Rock Minuet," the standout from his swan
birdcall Ecstasy. The former finds Reed getting outright upstaged by Hagerty, who delivers
the song's poetic refrain with such lilting elegance that you nearly learn Reed substantially
up at one point. In the latter sung dynasty, however, it's all crazy, rambling Reed in savage
form, reveling in an elegy for the death of the dangerous NYC. Schnabel and Kuras know
their subject enough to know how to human body him: with space, darkness, and unyielding
cool. The cool, of course, could have been delivered in an all-white bedroom with
stuffed bunnies and posters of High School Musical, as long as Reed was there.
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