Directed by: Sophie Fiennes
Not Rated, 115 minutes
Partway through “Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami,” Jones berates a French TV producer for hiring bikini-clad dancers to surround her, because, she says, they make the performance look like a brothel scene. After some back and forth, the producer agrees to get rid of the dancers, but Jones doesn’t like that either: “The dancers will hate me,” she worries. But she doesn’t stop him, and the decision is settled. A few frames later, the film cuts to a shot of a graveyard in the singer’s home country of Jamaica, and we linger on the anonymous gray stones for several seconds before moving on.
Whether you’re familiar with Grace Jones or not, the moment is a powerful and enlightening one. No matter the heights of one’s success, at the end of the road, a long, monochromatic sleep awaits us; it’s not so much a fear of death that drives Jones, but a fear of quiet, a fear of grayscale.
Fittingly, “Bloodlight and Bami” is a colorful, fiery documentary, a portrait of the 80s counterculture icon that dispenses quickly with mythmaking and asserts that creating a flamboyant public persona is just another natural response to the hardships of life. It’s not that Grace Jones preaches carpe-diem philosophy, but she knows that sorrow and pain can mute a life, and she is determined to stay loud.
While a structurally formulaic and even overlong film—two hours of scenes of Jones’ life punctuated by concert performances—“Bloodlight and Bami” gets away with it because of its consistent thoughtfulness. This is hardly a vanity project; where we see Jones using her fame to get her way, the film offers no gloss with which to flatter her. And elsewhere, we learn about the fearful childhood she spent in Jamaica with her brutal stepgrandfather, as well as the oppressive weight of religion on her family. In one telling moment, she takes a long swig of wine before entering her mother’s church.
Through scenes like these, it becomes clear why her art is so rebellious in spirit, and in fact so different from anything else that it would seem almost alien. The songs she performs in the concert scenes are somehow both highbrow and lowbrow, simplistic and complex, transforming the troubles of her real life into an act of ferocious, plainspoken defiance made for the audience’s benefit. She makes them sing along, she orders the balcony to stand up, she tells the crowd she loves them. She wears gaudy hats that barely stay on her head, dances in an almost militaristic manner, brandishes hand cymbals. She disappears and reappears from the stage, the extreme darkness of her skin allowing her to choose exactly when and how she is seen.
In the hands of Sophie Fiennes (“Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow”), Jones’ story unfolds with an impressive blend of objectivity and natural storytelling. In the scenes of Jones’ life, Fiennes takes a strict fly-on-the-wall approach reminiscent of the Maysles brothers (of “Grey Gardens” fame), but unlike documentarians that just show us how a subject is, Fiennes cares deeply about how her subject formed, and puts great effort into shaping these everyday scenes into a cohesive whole.
Every scene shades the portrait of Jones in a new way: Here she is a daughter timidly returning home, there she is a diva demanding the world; here a lover reminiscing with her son’s father, there an artist thwarted by logistics. The movie ends on a performance in which Jones sings “I’ll be a hurricane,” and it’s to Fiennes’ credit that the lyric doesn’t ring as the usual braggadocio of stardom, but rather the only apt metaphor for a life full of contradictions and multitudes.
Despite the length and breadth of Jones’ career, though, “Bloodlight and Bami” implies that she cares less about the specifics than the gist of her life’s work. “When I die,” she says late in the film, “I want to die happy.” It’s a comment that recalls the cemetery from earlier, but changes the meaning of the gravestones. Jones may be a shapeshifter of skills and moods and accents, but her only constant feeling seems to be great pity for those who aren’t enjoying life—because life should be a party; there’s only silence on the other side.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 5/25/18.