It was the Berlinale documentary.
Hopeful and dark, as danceable as it is full of philosophy.
As much about Nick Cave as about Warren Ellis.
Both a concert and an intimate portrait.
Andrew Dominik's This Much I Know To Be True
delves into Cave's music and life in the same way that it serves to celebrate the talent of Ellis, the only Bad Seeds bandmate who has stuck with him for years.
And now, like an old married couple who criticize and love each other, who don't understand each other without each other, they stop to sing and talk about confinement, their relationship and their last two albums,
Ghosteen
and
Carnage.
Dominik —who already portrayed Cave in
One More Time With Feeling
(2016), a documentary about the recording of
Skeleton Tree
, created during the singer's bitterness after the death of his son—positions the camera brilliantly, lights the performances (shot in a beautiful old empty building in Brighton in 2021) fiercely, and achieves a powerful result, which premiered at the Berlinale in the Special section with resounding success.
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Nick Cave on stage: death, music and confession
This Much I Know To Be True
opens with a very strange moment.
Musician Nick Cave, a cinematographic animal, speaks from behind his laptop, in which he answers the office he maintains online, and explains that during the confinement he decided to obey the orders of the British Government and "reconvert".
For this reason, he dedicated himself to ceramics, specifically Staffordshire, a traditional English style.
And for that, he shows 18 figures that he has created to illustrate the life of the devil, which he lovingly explains in a wonderful introductory story to the subsequent musical journey.
The documentary reaches its climax almost at the end with his interpretation of
Balcony Man,
a song from which the verse that titles the film comes out,
This Much I Know To Be True
(This is what I know to be true.)
In between, songs and confessions that Dominik shoots brilliantly, It does not reach the heights of
20,000 days on Earth
(2014), by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the great filmic approach to Cave, but it will delight fans, and with luck, of the not so fans.
An image from the documentary, with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.
The title could also be used to summarize the confessions reflected on the creative process and philosophy of Cave and his relationship with Warren Ellis.
Cave talks about the “oceans of shit” that he is capable of unleashing in an Ellis studio, but that there are always gems in them capable of becoming hymns.
They are both 64 and 56 years old, respectively, and they know that their musical life is definitely bound until their death.
Death, another fact that flies over the documentary, due to the sadness of some of the themes and the pain that still opens the flesh of Cave, whose teenage son Arthur died when he fell off a cliff in 2015. Cave says: "It is impossible to control our lives” and “being happy right now is not the most important thing for me”.
On a car trip and in another moment in front of the laptop he confesses: “I care more about being a husband, a friend,
And yet, when he sings, his true self appears.
The songs appear splendid in the film thanks to the photography by Irishman Robbie Ryan, and the lighting design by Dominik and Chris Scott.
You can see the cameras, the microphones, the tracking
shots...
nothing matters except hypnotically capturing the audience.
Cave is the animal of the stage, Wellis moves around, directing the choir and a string section, singing himself and accompanying with a cascade of sounds on the piano of his friend.
There appears a funny dictator, Marianne Faithfull, to recite
Prayer Before Work.
With oxygen and diminished faculties, treated with affection by all those around him —for the first time everyone appears masked— his moment is also a portrait of the futility of life and the eternity of art, in this case of music.
Hollywood, Albuquerque
, Hand of God, Lavender Fields, White Elephant...
For each of them, Dominik creates a different aesthetic, always within that old building.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, in 'This Much I Know To Be True'.
Dominik also puts the camera in front of Cave and his computer, as he responds to his fans at his The Red Hand Files website/consultant, opened three years ago.
He says that he does not answer instantly, but reads the questions and answers them later, to meditate on them.
"If I write at the moment, it will not be the best version."
It is moving to feel that he does not cheat, that he is stark, frank and thoughtful.
That he is afraid of losing his wife, who does not appear in the film, and launches to show his love to his other son, Earl, who appears in a video call from Belfast.
Being a musician who has delved into the sadness of life, Cave is now more concerned with community, with camaraderie.
And for that, he will always have Ellis for support.