Bob Marley: One Love

 

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green

Bob Marley

The director with Kingsley Ben-Adir

Ziggy Marley with Kingsley Ben-Adir

Haile Selassie

Emperor Haile Selassie's crown

BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE           B                                                                                   USA  (104 mi)  2024 ‘Scope  d: Reinaldo Marcus Green

Exodus.  Movement of Jah people!
Exodus.  Movement of Jah people!

Open your eyes (And look within)
Are you satisfied? (With the life you’re livin’?)
We know where we’re goin’

We know where we’re from
We’re leavin’ Babylon
We’re goin' to our Fatherland

Bob Marley - Exodus (Live At The Rainbow 4th June 1977) YouTube (7:24)

While this is an authorized biography from the Bob Marley family and estate, co-produced by son Ziggy and Bob’s wife Rita Marley, also daughter Cedella, while another son Stephen is the music supervisor, but that by no means indicates it’s better, though it should be, as the filmmaker has access to extensive material no one else has, so it should be more accurate and more thoroughly comprehensive, delving into the music and hidden complexities of his life.  By contrast, Sofia Coppola’s recent film Priscilla (2023) couldn’t even play an Elvis song, as his estate wouldn’t allow it, but that’s a much better film, made by a director with a more elaborately constructed artistic vision.  This, on the other hand, feels more conventional, yet there was nothing conventional about reggae legend Bob Marley who took the world by storm, combining American doo-wop and rhythm-and-blues with an odd new rhythm accentuating the offbeat, whose Rastafarian message of peace, love, and unity was embraced by a public clamoring for more, where the main thing was always the message contained in his music about how we live life and how we treat others.  The Marley family imprint is all over this film, actually introduced in a brief clip by Ziggy Marley, where this is something of a valentine to his father, paying tribute to the loving relationship between Bob and Rita, as the film presents him as his adoring family sees him, and how they want the rest of the world to remember him, though they were no longer together by the end, having survived the extramarital affairs, confessing in her memoirs No Woman No Cry: My Life with Bob Marley, she became more “like his sister, his mother, and his guardian angel.”  Making no attempt to tell the story of his life, this encapsulates only a brief period in the mid 70’s, a time of turmoil in Jamaica, where rival political factions, the American backed Jamaica Labour Party of former Prime Minister Edward Seaga and the socialist People’s National Party of the sitting Prime Minister Michael Manley, ended up unleashing rampant gang violence that swept the island, creating panic and confusion, leading to a state of emergency, giving the military and the police extraordinary powers to quell the storm, where some thought it may have been a plot to rig the election.  During this period, just days before Marley planned to give a free Smile Jamaica Concert promoting peace organized by Manley in order to ease tensions, politically motivated gunmen attempted to assassinate Marley and his wife, shooting both, yet each survived, with rival factions believing the concert was an excuse to hold a rally in support of Manley.  While still performing, briefly, exposing his wounds, this incident traumatized Marley and his family, sending Rita and the children to the United States to live in safety, while spending two years afterwards in self-imposed exile with his band in London where most of this film takes place, much of it told through flashback visions and stream-of-conscious memories, creating an internalized picture of the personal anguish he was going through.

The film is an excuse to reimmerse yourself in the legendary music of Bob Marley, which is easily the best part of the picture, as he almost singlehandedly gave rise to reggae music as an art form, extending the reach worldwide, following up on Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972), where the superb musical soundtrack (The Harder They Come (Original Soundtrack Recording) ...), featuring some of Kingston’s best acts, introduced reggae and its culture to the world.  British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir, previously starring as Malcolm X in Regina King’s ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI (2020) and Barack Obama in the TV mini-series THE COMEY RULE (2020), gives a captivating performance as Marley, while British actress Lashana Lynch provides a standout performance as Rita, as she literally shines, bringing firmness and compassion to the role, where her colorful presence as a member of the I-Threes background singers becomes an integral part of Marley’s stage shows, while there are also interspersed flashback sequences of a young, teenaged Marley (Quan-Dajai Henriques) meeting his future wife, Rita Anderson (Nia Ashi), revealing she’s been by his side since childhood.  Flashbacks also reveal how his white father, a British colonial officer, abandoned him at an early age, leading to recurring visions of a child surrounded by fire, while his father on a horse rides off and leaves him there.  This same image reappears multiple times, as if imprinted into his brain, but by the end of the film the father on the horse has been replaced by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, the revered father of the Rastafari movement where he is worshipped as God incarnate, viewing him as the living messiah that Jamaican Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey prophesized in the 1930’s would lead the African diaspora to freedom (“Look to Africa, when a black king shall be crowned for the day of deliverance is near!”).  These beliefs are at the heart of Marley’s music, running through the lyrics of his songs, perhaps best exemplified by Bob Marley - War (Official Music Video) - YouTube (3:55), which is based on Selassie’s iconic speech before the United Nations General Assembly on October 4, 1963 (Haile Selassie I's speech to the UN in 1963).    

Until the philosophy which hold one race
Superior and another inferior
is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war, me say war.

That until there are no longer first class
and second class citizens of any nation
Until the color of a man’s skin
is of no more significance than the color of his eyes
Me say war.

Fast forward to where we are today, as war rages unabated in both Ukraine and Gaza while the world looks on in horror and disbelief, yet also indifference, as not much has changed since Selassie made his remarks.  According to the Geneva Academy (Today's Armed Conflicts), an education institution in international humanitarian law, human rights, and transitional justice, there are currently more than 110 armed conflicts happening around the world at the moment, and most are due to ethnicity, color, or resources, just as they always have been, where in the infamous words of 19th century Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Anyone who’s read The Iliad by Homer can attest to this, written 800 B.C.E. yet the wholesale killing continues.  Marley’s revolutionary musical vision, which he always viewed as a transcendent experience, was meant to put an end to the hatred that divides us, using music to spiritually unite the world with a brilliant synthesis of musical styles, employing the language of the King James Bible to sing of revolution, emancipation, and freedom. 

In London, Marley experiences discrimination at the hands of the police and a violent reaction from punk rockers, discovering racism and rebellion go hand in hand, while also encountering cold temperatures and disagreements within the band, but it’s also where his vision began to transform with the epic scope of his album Exodus, Bob Marley & The Wailers - Exodus (Full Album) - YouTube (37:24), using an electric guitar to develop a brand new reggae sound.  Seen with his band leisurely tinkering with a new song, each member gradually joins in as we hear a rough draft of what would eventually become the title song, Exodus - YouTube YouTube (7:41), making a Biblical reference to Moses leading the Israelites out of exile and into freedom, the group is seen practicing the song as it develops, a slowed down, collaborative effort that features a trance-like hypnotic rhythm, punctuated by its resounding chorus of “Exodus, Movement of Jah people!”  Marley even wanted a different album cover, choosing something more simplistic, but immediately recognizable, countering the position of the white people footing the bills, music publicist Howard Bloom (Michael Gandolfini) and Island Records producer Chris Blackwell (James Norton), as they thought it would never work, but this was the first Marley single played on black radio stations in America, expanding what was predominately a white collegiate audience, becoming his first international hit.  It remains perhaps his most transcendent song, where it would be impossible to associate it with anyone other than Bob Marley, whose Rasta identity runs through it like a pulsing heart.  There are flashbacks to his first studio recording as a teenager with the Wailing Wailers, where a gun-toting record producer ("Obituary: Clement 'Sir Coxsone' Dodd") is ready to kick them out until he hears them directing a message to the rude boys on the streets in a new song, The Wailing Wailers - "Simmer Down" (Official Audio) - YouTube (2:50), urging them to stop the violence in the crime-ridden ghettos of Kingston, becoming a number one hit in Jamaica in 1964, signing Marley to his first record contract with Studio One, then the most important recording studio in Jamaica.  Isolated and alone in London, however, feeling the need for his wife’s presence, he sends for her, conjuring up memories of the past, recognizing her as his spiritually aligned soulmate, yet their European success has unintended consequences, with a gala of jet set cocktail festivities exposing a fractured relationship that bubbles up to the surface in a heated argument that comes out of nowhere (Marley had 11 children with 7 different women), where she reminds him, “You swim in pollution, you get polluted,” yet when she initially arrives he’s quietly heard strumming the lyric for a new song on an acoustic guitar, Bob Marley & The Wailers - Natural Mystic (Music Video) YouTube (3:21).

There’s a natural mystic
Blowing through the air
If you listen carefully now you will hear
This could be the first trumpet
Might as well be the last
Many more will have to suffer
Many more will have to die
Don’t ask me why

The release of this album coincided with a sold-out European tour that turned him onto a star, with Marley becoming a messianic figure with legions of followers, and a superstar in Jamaica, returning to the island as a triumphant hero, reconnecting with his children, where he was driven to perform yet another concert that would showcase rival political faction unity, One Love Peace Concert, where the leaders of the opposing parties joined hands, but they publicly continued to blame each other afterwards and the event did little to quell the political violence.  Leading up to that moment, however, Marley is visited by one of the men who shot him (an incident that never happened), remorsefully asking for forgiveness, where his calm response, as if possessed by a higher spirit, is an indication of what kind of man he is, as there’s no revenge or retribution in his heart, suggesting instead that the man needs to forgive himself in the eyes of the Creator.  The low point comes from the discovery he has a rare form of skin cancer on a toe that refuses to heal, injured during a pickup soccer game during the middle of his European tour, but he refused the recommended treatment, which was amputation of his toe to stop the cancer from spreading, as his Rastafarian religion considered it a sin to remove any part of the body.  While this is perfectly understandable, it also cost him his life.  This medical catastrophe sets a darker tone, postponing his planned American and African tours, finally making it to Zimbabwe in 1980 on the eve of their independence from British colonial rule, where crucial to his Rastafari worldview, which is embedded throughout his music, is a reverence for Africa as the source of black life.  He was specifically interested in resisting the racist, colonial systems that Rastafari teachings identify as a source of suffering among black people around the world.  While there is valid criticism that this film doesn’t tell the full story of his life, providing only brief excerpts, never attempting to unlock the key to his massive popularity, it was written by a coterie of writers that omits the darker edges, or even the fact that he wrote the Kaya album at the same time he was in London, yet it does equate with artists today taking a more active role in writing their own legacy and shaping their own image.  This is framed as a love story with a tragic ending, generating plenty of welled-up emotions from both the magnificence of the music and the power of the performances, creating more of a tribute to what Bob Marley stood for, where his message was never more needed than it is today, as there are alarming similarities to the divisiveness of Jamaica during the 70’s and the world of today.  Intolerance and hatred seem to define the new age, spreading like a virus, where the redemptive concepts Marley sang about seem to be forgotten, but this film is a pleasant reminder for a new generation.     

Bob Marley & The Wailers - Live at the Rainbow (Full Concert)  London, June 4, 1977, YouTube (1:23:12)

The Taste of Things (La passion de Dodin Bouffant)

 

Director Trân Anh Hùng

Trân with Dennis Lim at Film at Lincoln Center

Trân with Benoît Magimel

Trân with Juliette Binoche

culinary consultant Pierre Gagnaire

THE TASTE OF THINGS (La passion de Dodin Bouffant)            B                                        aka: The Pot-au-Feu                                                                                                                    France  Belgium  (135 mi)  2023  d: Trân Anh Hùng

The discovery of a new dish brings more joy to humanity than the discovery of a new star.        — Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel)

Winner of the Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival 2023, this deceptively simple film has little actual drama, chosen to represent France at the Oscars for Best International Film, passing over Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d'une chute) (2023).  From the maker of THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA (1993), VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN (2000), and Norwegian Wood (2010), Trân is a Vietnamese-born French filmmaker proficient in Vietnamese, French, and English languages, admittedly influenced by Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Mizoguchi.  His transcendent yet often ambiguous films are languid sensual experiences, offering a feeling as if the camera is floating on air, providing opulent textures in every frame, often providing a myriad of simultaneous events with multiple character relationships, showing a uniform theme of strong Asian cultural values, including family respect, bonding, and commitment.  Recalling works like Gabriel Axel’s BABETTE’S FEAST (1987) and Ang Lee’s EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN (1994), this is an impassioned ode to gastronomy mixed with philosophical overtones set in France during the Belle Époque era of the 1880’s, where the gluttonous indulgence on display is utterly flabbergasting, where less than .01% of the world’s population since the dawn of time has ever eaten like this, something more commonly associated with the hedonistic indulgence of Nero before the fall of Rome, a stark contrast from the naturally healthy cuisine in Vietnam, with minimal use of fats or oils, where the rich butter-saturated excess is certainly not healthy and is what we commonly think leads to heart disease.  The one-note aspect of non-stop cooking in the kitchen and then taking such extreme pleasure in the taste afterwards is so exaggerated to the extreme that at times it can feel absurdly laughable, but that is not the director’s intentions, as this is a masterclass on the culinary art of taste and bourgeois refinement, where it’s basically an elaborately staged two-person play revolving exclusively around food, with the intermingling of two like-minded, creative souls, establishing a slow rhythm in the opening half hour, utilizing an immersive, near wordless restraint that follows the main protagonists as they skillfully move around the kitchen without all that cooking gadgetry used today, seen hovering over the stove, adding ingredients, tasting, issuing precise instructions, with the director creating a culinary ballet in motion. The carefully chosen sound design includes birds, insects, and farm animals that are heard through open windows, but never seen, with no accompanying music, only a few bars of Bellini’s Casta Diva at the opening while a Jules Massenet theme closes the film leading into the final credits.  The authenticity of the subject matter required a Michelin-winning chef, Pierre Gagnaire, as a culinary consultant, along with his chef Michel Nave preparing all the food used on the set, and actually appears in one scene rattling off the meticulously detailed twenty course menu for a wealthy Eurasian Prince that is so grandiose that it required 8-hours to consume.  Adapted from the early 20th century gastromic novel La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet (The Life and Passion of Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet) by Swiss writer Marcel Rouff, one of the founding members of the Académie des gastronomes in 1928, which unfolds in the 1830’s referencing Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a pioneering writer of gastronomic studies and French lawyer who briefly fled to the U.S. to survive the aftermath the French Revolution, where the enduring popularity of the book is clear, as it went through 50 French editions between 1924 and 2010, where Rouff was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor (Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur), France’s highest civilian honor.  But French cuisine was largely established by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, known simply as Talleyrand, who became a leading member of the revolution, and Napoleon’s chief diplomat, where his meals were created by pâtissier Marie-Antoine Carême (Marie Antoine Careme - The First Celebrity Chef), the leading French chef of the early 19th century, who created the best cuisine possible for the influx of ambassadors from around the world.   

Most of the film takes place in the idyllic setting of a spacious 19th century chateau home kitchen that belongs to world-class gastronome and wealthy restaurateur Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), shot at the Château du Raguin (château du Raguin - Chateau fort et Manoir) in the Maine-et-Loire region of western France, with its stone walls, wood burning stove ovens, copper pots, extensive vegetable and herb gardens, and fields of livestock, overseen by Eugénie (Juliette Binoche, initially rejecting the role until it was expanded from a script rewritten with her in mind), an accomplished gourmet cook who’s able to bring his ambitious menus to life.  Much of what we see, and more importantly the way we see it, is through her eyes.  She is the behind-the-scenes force that orchestrates everything that transpires, seen waltzing around the stoves with stunning confidence and finesse, with so many things happening simultaneously.  And that’s pretty much it, and while Magimel and Binoche are exquisite throughout (in real life they have a child together, Hana, who reportedly cried at seeing this film bringing her parents back together), watching people cook for over two hours may not appeal to any but the most passionate food lovers, but what stands out isn’t so much what is being filmed, but the way that it is presented.  Like Trân’s other films, the utterly luxurious, choreographed elegance of Jonathan Ricquebourg’s luminous cinematography is the defining quality of the film, mostly shot on 35mm, and is nothing less than spectacular, along the lines of Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON (1975) or Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), taking full advantage of natural light and the bucolic countryside, mostly shot with roving handheld cameras that move with immaculate precision around the room, soaking in the meticulous preparation of food with loving adoration, with a candlelight dinner shot at the Château de Brissac, while another was shot alongside a shimmering moonlit lake.  The sensual bliss of how food is presented mirrors the romanticized relationship happening onscreen, both in body and spirit, as Eugénie has worked for Dodin for the last 20 years, known as “the Napoleon of culinary art,” and by turning the preparation of food into a kind of religious experience, it becomes their means of communicating, where cooking together is their prayerful dialogue, proof of how their relationship has evolved.  By now they’re able to complete each other’s thoughts in the kitchen, as their intimate working relationship with food is matched by his complete devotion to her, as he is in awe of what she can produce in the kitchen.  They also have a long-standing sexual attraction, living in separate quarters in the chateau where she is happy with the way things are, enjoying the teasing aspect of having the luxury of leaving her door opened or locked at night, which gives her the kind of freedom and control she thrives upon, a practice he has grown to accept.  Otherwise, this is a man’s world, as Dodin’s guests are exclusively male, a chauvinistic Greek chorus collection of some of the town’s most successful men, pillars of the community so to speak, always dressed in black, who share a common epicurean passion for the sheer delights of eating gourmet food, where the devotion these men express at the table, accompanied by only the finest French wines, exceeds the attention any of them ever show to the women in their lives, who are never seen, of course, as they prioritize food over anything else.  Accordingly, Eugénie, who never appears in the dining room, preferring to eat in the kitchen with the servants, has come to represent a kind of demigod in their eyes.  In this film, the sensual pleasure of food becomes linked to erotic passion, reminiscent of the culinary history of Afro-Brazilian Bahia culture on display in Hector Babenco’s sex farce Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands (Doña Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) (1976).  The film is dedicated to Trân’s wife, Trân Nu Yên-Khê, who not only starred in his first three films but also worked as an art director and costume designer for this film. 

As sublimely gorgeous as this film is to look at, given an impressionistic style of classical painting, this is as much about obsession as anything else, where there’s an indulgence factor that is disturbing, as this may be one of the unhealthiest films ever to grace the screen (vegetarians beware), setting a terrible example, and to simply overlook that is at one’s own peril.  Dodin confesses “it takes culture and a good memory to shape one’s taste,” yet one wonders why this extreme degree of cultural fascination is so representative of French culture, as so few can ever experience food on this level, or would ever want to, as it’s not much different than extreme sports, like skiing off a mountain, swimming the English Channel, or mountain climbing without ropes, where it’s all about the untainted purity of the experience.  Working alongside Eugénie in the kitchen are two dedicated young assistants, the ever faithful maid/sous chef Violette (Galatéa Bellugi) and her child prodigy young niece, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), turning the room into a quiet and reflective sanctuary, pausing to season and taste along the way, with Dodin himself making regular appearances to surgically cut and prepare various fish, meats, and vegetables, all freshly acquired, combining exact proportions of spices, where the art of cooking is not for the faint of heart, but the result of meticulous measurements of exact science that produce such rare results, like a pot-au-feu, vol-au-vent, and an omelette norvégienne (baked Alaska), as these guests have such carefully trained palettes that anything less than extraordinary would immediately be recognized as lacking heart and soul.  It is a world of riches and earthly delights, the historical interest of kings and queens, as only they had the leisure time and unlimited finances for living such a lavish lifestyle to truly appreciate such delicacies that take all day to prepare, celebrating Puligny Montrachet and Chambolle Musigny as the most sublime white and red burgundies on earth, where Marie Antoinette, the last queen prior to the French Revolution, grew extremely unpopular with the public and was guillotined for living in such decadence.  The royal family would be delighted that such exaggerated culinary interest would suddenly recapture the interest of the nation some two hundred years later, as if exonerated from their crimes.  Despite years of playing coy, Eugénie finally agrees to Dodin’s marriage proposal, apparently won over by an elaborate meal he prepares especially for her, not allowing her to set foot in the kitchen, then watching her consume every morsel with great anticipation, including champagne pulled from a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean, literally sweeping her off her feet, where the individualism of their separate worlds are suddenly combined, with the marital celebration capturing the picturesque beauty of a Renoir painting, where friends are gathered around a long table situated alongside a lake for lunch, with the couple seen afterwards walking through a sun-kissed meadow.  But after a series of unexplained fainting spells, she mysteriously disappears from view, leaving a void not only in his life but the audience as well, suggesting there is, like a meal one consumes, an ephemeral nature to all of this, as the intensity quickly dissipates with Binoche out of the kitchen, creating an uneven aftermath that simply lags, unable to capture the same fascination without her, as she is the engine that drives the picture.  While she is as essential as Sonia Braga is to DOÑA FLOR, this film leaves plenty of unanswered questions and is likely to appeal only to the most ardent culinary followers or those devoted arthouse cinephiles who will be mesmerized by the hypnotic beauty in every frame, concluding with that lyrical Massenet piano theme, Méditation from the opera Thaïs, Meditation from Thaïs for piano (Andrew von Oeyen) filmed in ... YouTube (5:18).