Lou Reed, Antony, Emmanuelle Seigner
Director: Julian Schnabel
The last time Julian Schnabel coaxed a film out of someone else's original material, he delivered an emotionally engaging and artistically enthralling piece. The same praise can hardly be heaped on Lou Reed's Berlin, his audio-visual document on the first live performance of the record in New York in 2006 (below).
Maybe it's Reed's icy stage presence - rather than celebrating what could have been vindication of a record much maligned when released in 1973, his body language suggests a dismaying mix of indifference and indignation; or perhaps it's down to the way the concert comes devoid of the theatrical set-up which would do justice to Berlin, a concept album about a woman's spiral towards oblivion set against the (then) divided German capital.
Schnabel himself is not at his best here either, having failed to bring about that added extra needed to make his piece something more than a concert film; the documentary-style cinematography he employs - shaky camerawork here, the deliberately obvious pulling of focus there - distracts rather than adds to the live vibes at the performance,- if there is any, of course, given the evidence laid out here.
Schnabel - who also designed the set for the concert - does try to flag up things a bit by interspersing the concert footage with the abstract short films his daughter, the artist Lola Schnabel, made to visualise the fall of Caroline (played by Emmanuelle Seigner, who worked with Julian on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), the protagonist in Reed's record. Sadly, they lack the potency to actually lift the proceedings at all - unlike, say, Derek Jarman's piece for the Pet Shop Boys' concert nearly two decades ago - and all in all, Berlin could have done with a much better film to mark its notoriety as one of the most depressing records in rock 'n' roll history. Extras: A booklet of song lyrics, trailer. (The Paul Morley interview with Reed, as advertised by Artificial Eye on its website, did not appear on my copy.)