Financial Times (London,England)

September 16, 1993, Thursday

Tina turns out trumps

By STEPHEN AMIDON

TINA: WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? (18)                                    Brian Gibson

THE BABY OF MACON (18)
Peter Greenaway

DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (18)

Julie Dash

ACCION MUTANTE (18)   Alex de la Iglesia
Biopics of living characters are fraught with two potential problems. Either the makers tend to gloss over the story in order to avoid the ire of subject and fans, or else the scandal knobs are turned to full volume so that every lurid whisper can be heard. It is to the credit of Tina: What’s Love Got to do With It that it steers a course somewhere between these two extremes, making for an engaging and believable star treatment.

Most people have at least some acquaintance with Tina Turner – the ageless legs, the majestic mane of hair, the stadium size voice. What few realised before the recent publication of her autobiography was that for the first 20 years of her career she was on the receiving end of terrible abuse from her husband Ike. It was a storybook romance at first, with Tina (whose real name is Anna Mae Bullock) meeting Ike when she took the stage at an amateur hour at his St Louis club. Despite a string of powerful R&B records and steady success on the concert circuit, however, Ike and Tina never really hit the big time, always a half step behind whatever trend held sway. The resulting strain took its toll on Ike, who lashed out at Tina with drug-fuelled fits of rage until the late 1970s, when she finally was able to leave him.
Director Brian Gibson tells this often brutal story with admirable honesty, refusing either to pull punches or linger on them. He moves seamlessly through Kate Lanier’s strong script, avoiding the melodrama that beckons throughout. The picture has a decidedly authentic look as well as feel – Ike’s transformations of dress and coiffure chart the passing years with wry accuracy. Only at the film’s end, in which Turner’s Buddhism is touted and the star herself appears in a final concert sequence, does the film go beyond drama into the realm of homage.
The two leads turn in powerful performances. Laurence Fishburne is frighteningly charismatic as the brooding Ike – it is easy to see why Anna Mae falls for him as a young man, easier still to see why Tina leaves him two decades later. In a decidedly thankless role, Fishburne manages to win our understanding for Ike’s monstrous behaviour without ever asking us to sympathise with it. And Angela Basset is equally fine as Tina, making the singer’s long sufferance credible. And a special note for courage should go to James Reyne, who, in the role of Turner’s manager Roger Davies, has the unnerving task of portraying the film’s executive producer.
Abuse of a different sort is the subject of Peter Greenaway’s latest celluloid conundrum, The Baby of Macon. Set during the 17th century, the film depicts a play in performance at a provincial French theatre, attended by a young prince and his entourage. The play’s action concerns a beautiful child who, after being miraculously born to a grotesque old woman, is believed to be imbued with holy powers. The child’s greedy sister claims him as her own, charging supplicants for the baby’s grace. She is soon discredited, only to kill the child after he is taken away from her. The city’s religious authorities sentence her to death, overcoming a loophole that forbids the execution of virgins by having her raped by 200 men before she is to be hanged.
Greenaway tells this story with his usual self-satisfied and gross pomposity, mixing ornately stylised visuals with truly unpleasant moments. A placenta is tasted, boils and sores are displayed, a young man is graphically gored by a bull, the murdered child is sliced into small pieces for souvenir hunters. In perhaps the film’s most unsettling moment, the child, at the age of perhaps four, watches as his sister/mother (Julia Ormond, a shoe-in for trouper of the year) foreplays in the nude with a young man.
Despite the unfiltered gore and cinematic dare, however, the film is stultifyingly boring, as murky and static as a painting badly in need of restoration. Much is written about Greenaway but little is said about just how bad he is at composing dialogue. One wonders what kind of movie he could make if he teamed with someone who understood dramatic writing. On the other hand, as long as he is in charge of both script and direction, it certainly takes away any element of doubt as to whether or not to see the film. Give it a miss. Despite the controversy and attention he somehow manages to engender, Greenaway continues to be the master of making moviegoing the one thing it should never be – drudgery.
Another filmmaker who is not overly concerned with narrative punch is Julie Dash, maker of Daughters of the Dust. Set on an island off the coast of South Carolina at the turn of the century, Dash’s film concerns a day in the life of the black Peazant family as most of its members are about to emigrate north. Little actually happens in the course of the day, and when it does, it is hard to understand exactly what it is.
Dash films her exotic setting with an exquisite eye, creating some memorable tableaux as she captures the primal mystery of this all-black enclave.
Unfortunately, like many visually gifted directors, she has a tin ear, producing a script that at times sounds like an anthropology text, at others is laden with cliches of the ‘you have to change with the times’ variety. And her refusal to spend much time establishing characters or explaining their conflicts makes this more like a stroll through a exhibition of sepia photographs than a full blooded drama.
Which brings us to the comprehensively unhinged antics of Accion Mutante. To describe the plot of this bit of insanity is akin to writing a study guide to a Marvel Comic, but here goes. It is the year 2012 and the world is run by beautiful people, with fascist cops administering beatings to any cripples who try to step out of line. Not surprisingly, the disabled feel hard done by, so some of them form a terrorist organisation to strike back. When their leader is released from prison they decide to kidnap an industrialist’s daughter from her wedding, spiriting her off to a planet inhabited by crazed miners.
The Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia’s film is every bit as bizarre as you might expect. But, despite the promising premise and frantic energy, the film is nowhere near as much fun as it needs to be to grab the viewer. Although there is plenty of gore and knockabout action, as well as a pleasingly idiosyncratic view of the future, the film lacks any sustained wit, at least the sort that can survive translation into subtitles. The result is an inescapable feeling that all this sound and fury signifies next to nothing.