![]() There’s even a sonic resemblance between X-Ray Spex and Crowley’s band, with honking New Wave sax prominent in both. CINEMA VERITE WASTELAND 3 CRACKWhat happens to Kate Crowley in Breaking Glass resembles the real-life story of Poly Styrene: punkette finds fame with songs about consumerism and dehumanization, only to crack up from the pressures of stardom. Certain sequences-a burning baby carriage, the word POST MODERN graffitied on a tenement wall, a ballerina pirouetting around a pyre-linger long after the non-storyline and loveless libertinism fade from memory. What makes it worth persevering is Jarman’s painterly eye. The mix of trained thespians from British theatre and first-time performers like future pop star Adam Ant creates a stilted blend of over-acting and under-acting. These admittedly striking images are punctuated with portentous pronouncements like “as long as the music’s loud enough we won’t hear the world falling apart,” delivered by characters with names like Mad and Chaos. In place of plot, there’s a parade of sadistic-masochistic tableaus: a girl carving the word “love” into a woman’s back, a model tied to a Maypole with barbed-wire instead of ribbons twined around her ripped flesh. The setting is an England where social order has largely collapsed and feral kids roam the streets stealing jewelry and Ray-Bans off car-crash victims. Falling somewhere between the campy shock schlock of Rocky Horror Picture Show (they share a couple of cast members) and the psychotic No Wave cinema of downtown NYC, the film manages to be at once silly and sordid. Punk’s revolt feels all the more exhilarating when it involves rebel girls rather than bratty boys.Īpart from a couple of raw docs, Jubilee was the first punk movie. Looking at this kind of dreamed-up punk cinema, it becomes clear that the best of these films often center on female protagonists. A fictional film, conversely, can convey the archetypal “anyone can do it” aspect of the movement, the way that nobodies seize the time and turn their lives into an adventure. A biopic can’t help treating its protagonists as exceptional figures-stars commanding the stage of History-in a way that undercuts the iconoclastic, “no more heroes” spirit of punk. A doc like the recent Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché, which was directed by her daughter Celeste Bell and Paul Sng, offers both the excitement of watching the X-Ray Spex singer smash through barriers in historical real-time and the poignant backstory of her struggles as a parent.īut arguably the best punk movies are stories that tap into the spirit of the time through imagined characters and invented situations. That’s where documentaries, whether fly-on-wall time capsules or reconstructions woven from archival footage and recollections, win out. CINEMA VERITE WASTELAND 3 SERIESWitness the derisive howls that greeted preview glimpses of Pistol, Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols series for FX, which debuts in May-the kids looked too winsomely cute to pass for Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. This applies as much to anti-charisma as conventional attractiveness. ![]()
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