Tina Arena, the 'worst album ever made', and more music doco highlights

Double J

Topic:Music

We Are The Shaggs is an ardent, highly entertaining doco on "the worst band ever". (Supplied: MIFF)

Settling in for an enlightening documentary with a compelling soundtrack is a unique cinematic delight.

It's the key appeal of the Music On Film program at Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF).

This year it's included the world premiere of Jebediah: Are We OK?, a candid doco on the Perth alt-rock icons, and a 25th anniversary screening of influential queer classic Hedwig And The Angry Inch with creator John Cameron Mitchell.

Beyond those, here's our take on program highlights and where you might view them beyond MIFF.

Tina Arena: Unravel Me (Dir. Adrian Russell Wills)

Tina Arena: Unravel Me is a suitably glamorous portrait of its "fierce and vulnerable" subject's long career. (Supplied: MIFF)

Tina Arena's six-decade career is more than deserving of a silver screen examination.

The Australian singer's enduring success marks her as a survivor who has had to "kick against the system time and time again," as manager Michael Parisi notes late in this glossy documentary.

Resilient and resplendent as ever, Arena is still out there doing it at age 58 with the same professional tenacity she did as a prodigious 9-year-old on Young Talent Time.

Arguably its biggest alumna, she dazzled audiences as well as the TV phenomenon's late, legendary creator Johnny Young.

But Filippina Lydia Arena, or "Pina" as her Sicilian-Australian family lovingly call her, initially struggled to shake her girl-next-door image and transition to a solo career. Until, that is, she penned Chains, Sorrento Moon and Wasn't It Good. Hits too good to ignore.

Tina Arena: Unravel Me excels in chronicling this formative period, punctuated with input from the modern-day doyenne, an effortlessly glamorous, eternally impressive vocalist captured in photo shoots and to-camera narration.

A shame then that the film doesn't dig deeper past the curated image, regularly falling back on platitudes and gesturing to profound emotional stakes without really interrogating them.

We're told, rather than truly shown, the challenges of juggling motherhood and pop stardom, or navigating multiple international markets.

Nuance is often skated over in favour of melodrama or simply ticking the next box in Arena's trajectory.

Sometimes this surface-level approach is welcome. Arena's "winning partnership" with former manager, ex-husband, and now convicted rapist Ralph Carr is swiftly moved on from after being introduced to establish his part in shepherding Arena's 1994 commercial breakthrough.

Her best-selling Don't Ask album swept the ARIA Awards and made Arena the first female artist to win Album of the Year. Questioning how so many before her were overlooked, she begins poking at the bars of the gilded pop cage she found herself in.

Unravel Me bills her as a hard-working woman who overcame the fixed odds of a male-dominated industry. Why then is the doco's many talking head interviews commanded by a string of male, pale, stale record execs who dictate her highs and lows.

Several of whom, the film neglects to mention, operated under the toxic regime of disgraced Sony Australia boss Dennis Hadlin.

There's far more gained from the brief times we hear from Arena's peers. Archival footage of her palling about with Celine Dion is a delight, while her 2015 ARIA collaborators The Veronicas and Jessica Mauboy offer praise late in the piece.

Unravel Me falls short of its aim to be the kind of empowering, celebratory expose that made similar features on Celine Dion, Tina Turner and Kylie Minogue so rewarding.

Ultimately, Arena's grand half-century legacy is deserving of a more distinctive film.

Tina Arena: Unravel Me is in cinemas nationwide from August 27.

We Are The Shaggs (Dir. Ken Kwapis)

In 1960s small-town New Hampshire an obsessive father forced teenage sisters Dot, Helen and Betty Wiggins to take up instruments they clearly hadn't mastered.

The result was The Shaggs, the sisters writing bizarre songs that were out of tune and out of time.

The sibling trio became a cult rock music litmus test, variously dubbed as groundbreaking genus and, frankly, "the worst band ever".

Their crude curios 1969 album Philosophy of the World has prompted decades of disdain as well as delighted fascination.

It was hailed by Frank Zappa as "better than The Beatles" but also torn apart by Rolling Stone as "the worst album ever recorded".

Both extremes are valid in Ken Kwapis's ardent, highly entertaining doco We Are The Shaggs, which begins shrewdly with a montage of regular folks reacting to The Shaggs.

Their alien, amateurish songs provoke a mixture of laughter, pain, confusion, and the big question: "Is it music?"

A succession of experts and fans puzzle that out through various lenses. Are The Shaggs punk? Riot grrrl trailblazers? Accidental pioneers of DIY outsider music?

Then there's two absorbing tribute acts: a Brooklyn band recreating every bizarre tuning, phrasing and timing as gospel and violin duo String Noise, who re-arrange The Shaggs as a cerebral exercise.

Some cases are more convincing than others, but the film never sets a judgemental agenda, entertaining with animated sequences and interviews with surviving band members Dot and Betty.

Now in their seventies, Dot and Betty Wiggin say they "missed out on a lot" as a child band driven by their strict father. (Supplied: MIFF)

They're charmingly down-to-earth and just as baffled as anyone by a cult legacy that includes being championed by Kurt Cobain and made the subject of a New Yorker profile and even an off-Broadway play.

The Shaggs songbook — odes to pets, fantasies about fast cars, desires for romance and rebellion — possesses an untarnished naivety, the product of being cloistered by their suffocatingly strict father, Austin Wiggin.

Kwapis triumphs in his mission to humanise the sisters, offering a perfect introduction to their extraordinary story in a dignifying portrait. We Are The Shaggs also poses bigger questions about art and how our perceptions can be shaped or subverted, even inadvertently.

To that end, legendary Prince engineer and academic Susan Rogers provides the most salient point: who gets to decide what is good and bad?

She compares The Shaggs to Picasso's cubist paintings, questions if they'd face the same ridicule were they brothers, and marvels at how they "invented their own music language and stuck to those rules, whatever they are" in unruly songs that disguise "pure universal truths … that's easier said than done".

We Are The Shaggs screens as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival on September 12 and 13.

Broken English (Dir. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard)

Marianne Faithfull reflects on her life and legacy with a Ministry of Not Forgetting staffer, played by George MacKay. (Supplied: MIFF)

Named after Marianne Faithfull's 1979 comeback album, Broken English frames the British musician and screen star's life through the fictional Ministry of Not Forgetting, headed by a besuited Tilda Swinton and charged to "recalibrate her legacy".

This elaborate conceit shouldn't be a surprise coming from Iain Forstyth and Jane Pollard, the directing team behind the equally unorthodox Nick Cave doco 20,000 Days on Earth.

It certainly sets Broken English apart from the pack. But the framing device is also obtuse, sometimes distracting and, worse, at odds with a woman who regularly cut through bullshit.

Thrust into the industry at age 17, Faithfull was initially sold as an "angel-blonde" pop and folk chanteuse. She soon became an icon of swinging 60s London and a punching bag for the stuffy British press.

Broken English succeeds in reversing her dismissal as merely Mick Jagger's muse and girlfriend, damning her tabloid portrayal as a Rolling Stones groupie, demonised as the "nude girl" in a police raid on Keith Richards's estate.

An indomitable creative who overcame addiction, miscarriage, breast cancer, and a COVID-induced coma, Faithfull proved her growing artistry across multiple mediums. She was also a consistent target for merciless scrutiny and misogyny.

One powerful montage shows a series of sexist interviewers delightfully grilling her on celebrity romances and drug use.

Watching back at the sequence she remarks: "Despite all these stupid people and their stupid questions, I've actually had rather a lovely life, so f**k 'em!"

The film's beating heart is seeing the late-70s Faithfull, sharp-witted and radiant, making her oxygen tube look stylish, react to various younger versions of herself.

Whether revising or rattled by her own prior perspectives the emotion is written deeply, often wordlessly, on her face, beaming at kudos from Bob Dylan or long-time producer and confidante Hall Willner.

Faithfull was an artist's artist. Case in point: devotees like Beth Orton, Courtney Love and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore show up to reinterpret her music.

Her role as a "destabilising influence" is debated by a roundtable of British personalities including broadcaster Edith Bowman, actor Sienna Guillory, and musician Bat For Lashes.

These many guests and fussy trimmings offer plenty of glowing praise but also reduce time with the main attraction, herself, who is unwaveringly honest about her mistakes and successes.

Despite her troubled persona, Faithfull doesn't buy into the notion of the tortured romantic. "F*** no! But it's a good hook to hang things on," she says.

Broken English is already historic for the fact Faithfull died during its production. Following a fourth-wall-breaking introduction by Swinton we're treated to what would be her final performance.

Reuniting with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis in the studio for a rendition of 2018's Misunderstanding, Faithfull's elegantly coarse voice gifts the wise lyrics heft even before the profound realisation that it's the last time anyone would hear her sing.

As the old showbiz mantra goes, always leave them wanting more.

Broken English is in cinemas nationwide from 17th September.

Hear My Eyes: Memento (Dir. Christopher Nolan; Score: Michael "Cavs" Cavanagh)

"Cavs" Cavanagh performs the live score to Memento for Hear My Eyes at Hamer Hall, Melbourne. (Supplied: Hear Me Eyes, Simon Aubor)

Pairing star director Christopher Nolan's structure-flaunting, daytime noir Memento with King Gizzard & The Lizard drummer Michael "Cavs" Cavanagh is exactly the kind of cool, unlikely pairing that Hear My Eyes specialise in.

For over a decade, the Melbourne collective has enlisted musicians to produce live scores for cult movie classics. And following the success of re-scoring Terminator 2 with synths (and lasers), Hear My Eyes scores another hit with Memento.

Released in 2000, Memento stars Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator who suffers from a form of amnesia where he can't make new memories. Instead, he relies for better or worse on notes, tattoos and intuition to track down his wife's murderer, aided and abetted by a cast including Carrie Ann-Moss and Joe Pantoliano, both fresh from The Matrix.

Just as the film makes the most from meagre ingredients, so too does Cavs, moving between two drum kits on-stage at the Melbourne Recital Hall.

On the right: he rolls out jazzy grooves familiar to classic hard-boiled detective flicks. On the left: a kit adorned with pads to trigger glassy synth notes, providing both moments of ambience and disquieting atmosphere that work beautifully with the protagonist's mixed-up memories.

Finding balance between augmenting the emotional beats and allowing space for them to breathe, Cavs syncs marvellously with the film's rhythmic pacing: cutting briefly to silence at the slam of a door, or building with nerve-shredding intensity to the hammering of a firearm.

It gels so well, there are times you forget he's there.

It may be a tad overwhelming for first-time viewers but this fresh score provides a vital new way to experience a film that, even once you learn its twists, retains its power to puzzle and satisfy.

It's a shame so much thought and care is put into something that, besides an additional Sydney screening, many will miss out on. Here’s hoping Umbrella's upcoming 4K release includes Cavs's skin-thumping score as an alternative audio track.

Hear My Eyes: Memento plays at the Sydney Recital Hall on August 29.

See more ABC coverage in your search results

Promotion