Jazz singer Billie Holliday struggles with addiction to heroin and men while being persistently harassed by the FBI for racist reasons.
A spectacularly impressive recreation of a historical milieu, with settings, costumes, make-up, ways of speaking and cultural attitudes supremely realistic and immersive. Every scene is a magnificently composed world, but together they form no cohesive narrative, no complex thematic expression apart from a recreation in popular form of a racist history, and no interesting trajectory for a complex, inspirational, talented woman apart from self-destruction and degeneration. There is no depth, no overarching motivation, no transformation, just a pain explained in flashbacks of trauma. Like her controversial song "Strange Fruit", the painful and shameful recent history of racist America is being revealed, but is Holliday's strength and talent and legacy being honoured, is her story being given the depth it deserves? Andra Day's performance is the same, extremely impressive on the surface, powerfully lucid within an individual scene, but no dramatic shape. Perhaps the screenplay is to blame. It amounts to a glossy surface and no heart.
The film's political theme is clear: lynchings have not yet been banned, even if her song about them was. But the more intimate theme is perhaps akin to Asif Kapadia's powerful documentary Amy: that we, from our distance, though the veil of the media, have some empathy and patience for the particular and real challenges faced by those who pour themselves into music for us.
A spectacularly impressive recreation of a historical milieu, with settings, costumes, make-up, ways of speaking and cultural attitudes supremely realistic and immersive. Every scene is a magnificently composed world, but together they form no cohesive narrative, no complex thematic expression apart from a recreation in popular form of a racist history, and no interesting trajectory for a complex, inspirational, talented woman apart from self-destruction and degeneration. There is no depth, no overarching motivation, no transformation, just a pain explained in flashbacks of trauma. Like her controversial song "Strange Fruit", the painful and shameful recent history of racist America is being revealed, but is Holliday's strength and talent and legacy being honoured, is her story being given the depth it deserves? Andra Day's performance is the same, extremely impressive on the surface, powerfully lucid within an individual scene, but no dramatic shape. Perhaps the screenplay is to blame. It amounts to a glossy surface and no heart.
The film's political theme is clear: lynchings have not yet been banned, even if her song about them was. But the more intimate theme is perhaps akin to Asif Kapadia's powerful documentary Amy: that we, from our distance, though the veil of the media, have some empathy and patience for the particular and real challenges faced by those who pour themselves into music for us.