NETFLIX – ON DEMAND – DOCUMENTARY
The very prolific British documentary filmmaker Tony Palmer (born in 1941), also a theater and opera director, devoted a large part of his filmography to classical and contemporary art music: his first musical film was, in 1967, devoted to Benjamin Britten; thirty years later, he produced a remarkable portrait of John Adams, without forgetting The Salzburg Festival (2006), a rather grating painting of the famous summer event.
But Palmer was also interested in popular music. In 1971, he portrayed British drummer Ginger Baker and co-signed with Frank Zappa 200 Motelswhich he describes as surrealist documentary. In 1972, Leonard Cohen commissioned a film from him, Leonard Cohen, like a Bird on a Wire. From 1976 to 1980, Tony Palmer produced for the BBC a documentary fresco in seventeen parts devoted to pop music, All You Need Is Love. The Story of Popular Music.
His film devoted to the kitsch Liberace (1919-1987), The World of Liberace (Liberace’s World1972), is now available on Netflix in a subtitled version and remastered in 2012. This is probably the best portrait of the pianist with fingers as swiftly virtuosic as they are heavily glib, star of Las Vegas or of Radio City Hall in New York. highest paid of her time.
Liberace, a child prodigy born Wladziu Valentino Liberace to a mother of Polish origin and a father of Italian origin, began a career as a classical pianist. Also a jazz pianist, supper clubnightclub and even striptease cabaret (which pays more), he decides to devote himself to a popular repertoire with a little classical – “without the boring passages”he will say… “Liberace is not [Arthur] Rubinstein; but Rubinstein is not Liberace either”wrote a reviewer.
Crack
Palmer lets Liberace monologue as the camera films a tour of his Los Angeles and Palm Springs homes, whose over-the-top decor transcends the notion of bad taste (despite valuable antique furniture and artifacts), its cars (including the famous rhinestone-plated Rolls). “The difference between little boys and men is the size of their toys”, recalls a formula that Liberace framed.
“Lee” dwells at length on her gigantic rhinestone and diamond wardrobe where everything appeared in three sizes: “Thin, fat and impossible!” » But, at the turn of a sentence, a crack appears in this follower of the strict maximum: “Maybe the reason I have so many clothes is because as a kid I had to wear my big brother George’s…” During another sequence, we see the author of Liberace Cooks ! (1970, out of print), a book described as “bling-bling cooking recipes” (with slices of salami in a bouquet and macaroons encrusted with faux sugar stones), cooking (his other passion) and preparing lasagna.
His person expresses both fatuity, kindness and a strong dose of self-mockery.
Liberace smiles with a mouth whose teeth are as white as the keys of the keyboard instruments in his collection – including a rare piano-organ, a choir piano and a movie organ – which he plays in turn. His person expresses both fatuity, kindness and a strong dose of self-mockery. So that it is difficult to grasp to what degree one must consider his remarks. In any event, Palmer’s film never takes an ironic look at Liberace.
Laborious pretexts
But, behind these composite mines, one senses a threatening abyss. It is painful to see this ” mom’s son “, as it looks, strive to hide his flamboyant homosexuality (he will deny it to the end) and to invent laborious pretexts for his celibacy: he must not shock or disappoint the mature ladies who made up his audience. The same people who would learn that AIDS was the cause of the death, in 1987, of their ermine idol.
The film Behind the Candelabra (“My life with Liberace”, 2013), by Steven Soderbergh, with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon (who plays Scott Thorson, the musician’s lover), denounced a less glorious side of the character. What happens in the bathroom all marble and mirrors is not quite, in the film, what Liberace says in Tony Palmer’s documentary…
In this regard, the documentary maker has made it known publicly that, while he recognizes that “Soderbergh is a very good filmmaker and the film very skillfully directed”he disapproved of much of his distortions of the truth. “Never did Liberace simper on stage like Michael Douglas does., said Palmer, in July 2013, to the British site Digital Spy. He hardly ever used that whirlpool and, above all, Liberace was a good man, truly and genuinely good. This movie did him the worst service. »
« The World of Liberace », documentaire de Tony Palmer (EU, 1972, 75 min).