Before, documentaries were made about films and now films are made about documentaries.
That's the feeling left after watching
Respect
, a biographical fiction about one of the greatest myths in American music, Aretha Franklin.
Died with the honors of a monarch in 2017, a year later the movie
Amazing Grace came out
, recovering the material that Sydney Pollack had recorded in 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles, where the interpreter recorded which would be his best-selling album.
The material, lost until recently, was a discovery on a par with that other great testimony about African American music and culture,
Summer of Soul
.
More information
Aretha Franklin and the "Sistine Chapel of the Gospel"
Aretha Franklin: the unhappy queen
In front of either of these two historical documentaries,
Respect
, whose footage plays roughly to the textures of the file, is reduced to nothing. Not only because it is a biopic more typical of Wikipedia, but also because it blatantly abuses a structure built on musical successes that give the film the narrative soul that it lacks. The film incurs in a succession of vital episodes - musical themes without an internal thread, biographical episodes that despite their dramatic harshness pass through the screen as if nothing: Franklin was a mother for the first time at 12 years old and for the second time at 14, her father was a tyrant preacher who was quite into partying and the singer's first husband, whose intimate fracture is dispatched by shoehorn into his alcoholism, had a very long hand. Early motherhood was extended with two more children, but in
Respect
Those things in life just seem like a good excuse to write millionaire songs.
Ultimately it is a film made from such a degree of homage and excess of respect for the icon that his humanity is nowhere to be seen.
Jennifer Hudson manages to look a lot like Franklin, but that doesn't matter that much either, the actress and the film aspire, and surely they will be there, to enter the Oscar career, always so close to this type of soft products for the gallery and for a Self-indulgent current agenda (African-American activism, feminism ...) but deep down it is just an inane review of a life that this film is too big for.
RESPECT
Direction: Liesl Tommy.
Performers: Jennifer Hudson, Leroy McClain, Forest Whitaker, Tate Donovan, Marlon
Wayans.
Marc Maron.
Genre: drama, United States, 2021.
Duration: 145 minutes.