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| GotToRollMe |
Reflections in Super 8
By MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
Published: May 18, 2007
The premise of "Rolling Like a Stone" makes it sound like a Christopher Guest comedy: members of the 1960s Swedish rock bands the Namelosers and the Gonks and some of their friends and groupies pore over Super 8 snippets from a 1965 party they attended with the Rolling Stones, trying to remember the event and their lives at that time.
But while "Stone" has poignant and funny moments, it's a serious film about mortality, success and the ephemeral nature of experience and memory. Like other great meditative dramas ("Hiroshima, Mon Amour," "The Limey"), it is built around tight close-ups of silent, thinking people, most of them old enough to have plenty to think about. When the filmmakers cut from these introspective faces to relevant photographs, souvenirs and bits of home movies and newsreels, it seems as if the past is intruding on and sometimes overwhelming the present.
Late in the movie the filmmakers intercut footage of a 21st-century reunion concert by the now silver-haired Namelosers - once described as the Rolling Stones of Sweden - with black-and-white 1965 newsreel film of teenage groupies weeping and fainting. The weathered musicians are like superheroes whose powers have ebbed with time.
And yet the message is not, to quote a Stones song, what a drag it is getting old. Yes, the subjects' feelings of youthful invulnerability have been slowly sanded away. But the compensations - love, marriage, children, tragedy and reinvention - have proved more complex and satisfying than they could have imagined.
'Rolling Like a Stone'
by Aaron Hillis
May 15th, 2007 1:33 PM
Directed by Magnus Gertten and Stefan Berg
May 18 through 24
Anthology Film Archives
On fire back in June of '65, the Rolling Stones rocked their first-ever Swedish gig and then spent the night partying at a private house in Malmo alongside shaggy local bands and sundry cool cats. Mick, Keith, and the late Brian Jones likely forgot all about that soiree by their next tour stop, which makes Rolling Like a Stone's unearthed Super-8mm footage of the event such a bittersweet treasure. This delightfully pensive 65-minute doc catches up with a semi-connected group of those partygoers to examine through a colored gel of hindsight four decades' worth of aging, identity crises, and expectations realized and adjusted. Think of it as a variation on Michael Apted's Up series, as some major players - i.e., the modern-day Stones - don't show, while others open up to the camera. There's pensioner-to-be Tommy, who gets his group, The Namelosers, back together again for a sold-out reunion show; single dad Ola, a former member of The Gonks who sifts through his dusty love letters from fans; and Mona, who wonders if Jones would still be alive had she run away with him. More touching than bleak, their brushes with fame long ago are only a jumping-off point to matters more personal.
Rolling Like a Stone
by Rob Humanick
Posted: May 17, 2007
A long-forgotten reel of grainy home movie footage taken at a 1965 party in Malmo, Sweden is the relic to which Rolling Like a Stone owes its existence. Like a leftover scrapbook memory from the heyday of the British Invasion, it features the young Rolling Stones on tour with fellow musicians, friends, and groupies, all immortalized through film at that moment in their lives before continuing on their individual paths of existence. Were it not for its celebrity factor, this seemingly uneventful clip would likely strike many as nothing more than a bit of disposable celluloid, yet the immense joy of Rolling Like a Stone is the ease with which the filmmakers evoke the spectrum of feelings and memories contained within - or rather, evoked through - it. Tracked down so they might catch the viewer up on their lives in the 40 years since that recorded encounter, the individuals featured in the film - save for the Stones themselves - reflect upon not only the paths they've taken since that moment in time, but on the distressingly tenuous role even the most minute choices play in determining the outcome of those courses. In a subtly profound moment, Mona Ovendal, a former love interest of the late Brian Jones, gazes lovingly at her husband even as her eyes speak to a question she cannot help but ask: would Brian still be alive today if she'd stayed with him all those years ago? Moments such as these are made all the more potent by the filmmakers' wise decision to keep intact only the most necessary of talking-head scenes, with most of Rolling Like a Stone edited not unlike a fine silk tapestry of audio interviews, stock footage, and historic montage, woven together in ways that truly tingle the subconscious, as if these individuals are providing the commentary on the Tarnation-style DVD of their own lives. This is a film acutely aware of its own power over life, affirming the fact that even the most seemingly trivial piece of celluloid is, quite possibly, the stuff dreams are made of.
[Edited by GotToRollMe] |
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