Pretending to sell us Patti Smith: Electric Poet as the definitive portrait of the “pronuba of punk” evokes a certain modesty and boredom in the face of the umpteenth mythomaniac and hollow audiovisual product. Anne Cutaia and Sophie Peyrard’s film is another saint of a rock epigraph to whom practically everything has been said (starting with herself and her wonderful memoirs) and which deserves a more different, intelligent and critical approach. .
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Maybe the attempt will work for a rookie manifesto, and there it plays at least, but it will drive anyone who knows the career of the author of Horses, one of the most influential rock records in history, crazy. Smith is 75 and her mesmerizing figure is still worth a close-up, but not so simple that it doesn’t even ask the big questions about a woman in a jacket and tie fighting for her constituency in music history.
Androgynous, shy and hypersensitive, Smith turned her cherished early memoir, Just Kids, into a compelling starting point for a story that she herself strewn with myths and epigraphs. Although Electric Poet has good archival material and interviews with her at various points in her life, the report is short-lived and unable to question a feat which, as the actress herself reveals in his books, is closely linked to his own, linked to the romantic figure of the actor is his own imagination.
Electric Poet recreates the rocky terrain of 1970s New York, but such major work in the state as Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground, demonstrating how a well-known story can be told in another way, or The Andy’s series Netflix’s Warhol. Diaries, which, if not for Haynes’ documentary grandeur, at least offers exuberant footage and intimate detail from a figure as elusive as Warhol. Both comparisons are probably unfair, but in a time when music doc startups are on the verge of overdose, sophistication is in order.
Patti Smith: electric poet
Address: Anne Cutaia, Sophie Peyrard.
Goods: Documentation. France, 2021.
Platform: filming
Duration: 54 minutes
Premiere: April 8.
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