Review of the Manu Chao and Radio Bemba rockumentary "Babylon's Fever"

Jean-Luc Godard has been quoted as saying: "Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and [Michael] Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary." Such a comment, originating from one of the cinema’s arch-leftists, is addressed to a satirist and humorist who is somehow woefully unfunny, unless he is being blown to pieces by Trey Parker. Rob Reiner’s seminal mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap, manipulated the convention of the cinematic essay to remove the pomp and pretension beheld by musicians, in a bid to reclaim the life-affirming qualities of music; it did not do this by hectoring or grandstanding a la Moore, but by making us laugh. The film I wish to focus upon in this review, Babylon’s Fever, created in 2002 and directed by Raphael Frydman, shares these aspirations. This documentary would appear to be so unknown, it is yet to be listed even on the IMDB, and this is why I have longed to bring it to your attention! The subject is the 2001 concert tour of the Parisian singer-songwriter Manu Chajavascript:void(0);
Collapse Extended Texto and his latino-ska ensemble Radio Bemba.

It seems pertinent nowadays that music should again require to be reclaimed. The Live 8 concerts (now migrating across the world in DVD form) frequently disappointed; was Mariah Carey there for anything other than self-promotion? Did Robbie Williams and Pete Doherty attend for reasons other than lechery and debasement? Did St. Bob Geldof really have to sing? Most importantly, did they have any effect on the eight suits that congregated at an Edinburgh hotel? Not at all, and Chao, who demonstrated against those same suits (filled in only rare instances, by different faces) at the Genoa summit in 2001, may well have realised this when he played Live 8 Paris.

There is something discomfiting about musicians who bray quasi-political slogans that do not reflect their attitude to music or humanity – Mariah Carey again. Manu Chao, by contrast, has frequently been compared with Joe Strummer, the incisive and iconic left-wing libertarian frontman of The Clash. Unfortunately Rude Boy (1980), the frenetic film that followed The Clash on tour, too often refused to allow the music and its furious delivery to speak for itself, obfuscating its subject with fictional portrayals of police brutality and racism, and allowing an embarrassingly stoned Strummer struggle to define socialism when a song would have been so much better.

Woodstock (1970), certainly a rockumentary with an ideological stance, bears endless rewatching thanks to the quality of the performances; their lack of pretension, their desire to celebrate their freedom to indulge in music and love. The final scenes witness Hendrix’s comment on Vietnam by guitar, and we can hardly be surprised to discover that Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, two artists who would never allow patronising sententiousness to sully aesthetic integrity, were heavily involved in the editing and assistant direction. Babylon’s Fever appears to borrow heavily from the Scorsese/Schoonmaker alphabet; both from music films The Last Waltz and Bad, and from work such as Raging Bull. This is just as well, although Scorsese’s recent Bob Dylan film was highly accomplished, the talking heads format that transfers us to a prescribed past, inevitably lacks the democratic sentience and visceral impact of the present – the sensation of touring with a band, or being on stage with them.

Chao’s most recent album, Proxima Estacion… Esperanza (Next Station… Hope), and this film’s reference to Babylon appear to describe an indefinite tour; a need to keep moving between and into new and eclectic musical styles and disparate geographical locations in a bid to find the golden chords. Unusually Frydman focuses neither on interviews, nor the band’s live shows, but the manner by which Radio Bemba continue to puruse new musical avenues, even as they are travelling. They simply never stop playing: a table in a trattoria becomes the perfect place for some stomp; we see Manu recording new songs on the tour bus and in what appear to be hastily converted university dorms – he even gives an acoustic performance for the camera in a toilet cubicle; we see the trombonist entranced by the percussive properties of a jar lid, and night after night we witness the band members join huge crowds in fiestas, playing their instruments to them… and enjoying doing it a lot. When they demonstrate against the G8 they unite with the throngs with their instruments and play. Bono is perhaps a worthy recipient of a Nobel Prize nomination, but how often do you see him blending in, sacrificing his remarkable ego for a common end? Perhaps Rattle and Hum (1988) would have been a bit better with a little less portentousness!

Frydman likes his camera to move with them, scrutinizing every, increasingly wearied, face, watching them look out of windows as they traverse yet more space in cars, in the tour bus, on motorbikes. He makes touring look exhausting, and he makes it look terrifying. This is where the Scorsese alphabet comes in: he employs red tints and trails, descends into monochrome and uses any other device that may encourage us to empathise with the performers’ emotions. We begin to feel lost on the tour, uncertain of our location anymore until, finally, we are on a beach, in silence, dawn is breaking, and the lead guitarist informs us: “You’re now in Sardinia”.

Despite being caught up in the journey, Frydman still finds time to obsess about the minutiae, again eschewing the typical rockumentary obsession with egos: we view the routines of the stage personnel, we survey the bands’ rehearsals and warm-ups and we are introduced to the whole armoury of the percussionist; inevitably even this simple task dissolves into a free-form jazz odyssey.

I quote from Spinal Tap there; it is the humour of the director and the band members that truly sets it apart from other rockumentaries. The film opens with two band members greeting director “Rafi” with a song consisting of guitar and catarrh-filled spitting. The clown and undoubted star of Babylon’s Fever however is the band’s Rasta MC Bidji (pictured), France’s real-life answer to Nigel Tufnel. On a plane he muses over the immortal qualities of bottled water – Frydman pans ingeniously to the inscrutable stare of Bidji’s straight man, bassist Gambit throughout – before discovering that they all have best before dates. On another occasion, Bindji seizes the microphone during a sound test and allows us to hear his singing abilities; again Frydman pans to discover Gambit with his fingers in his ears. Seconds later the locals are complaining about the noise he's making. Almost as though they’d walked into Monty Python and the Holy Grail they are ridiculed as only the French can ridicule (“K-nig-hits!”); the citizens leave with a flourish of Gallic shrugs, and we are left thinking back to when Spinal Tap played the Puppet Show and the US Airbase.

In fact, being French, they can barely consume a meal without pursuing some existential issue. Another member of the band, perhaps aping Derek Smalls, claims to be “floating in pure abstraction”.

Nevertheless it is clear that the humour is intentionally and warmly observed by Frydman. There is a whole section of pastiche in which the director interviews Chao as though he were a football coach, “No one is injured,” Manu responds, “And no one has smoked too much.” There then follows a bemusing montage of footballs being kicked at concerts, a five-a-side match, and footage of Bindji playing a football computer game with a friend. Again, can one imagine Coldplay allowing themselves to be portrayed in such an irreverent manner? This film pits pleasure against portent, whilst never detracting from the liberal, post-colonial nature of the music; the genius is that this is not a film about Manu Chao – an emblem of contemporary world music – it is about a troupe of travelling minstrels; it departs from the heady subjectivism of recent American documentaries and exudes the intimate warmth typical of French documentaries, such as Être et Avoir (2002).

The conclusion of the film is truly spectacular. It is not only the end of the tour but the end of Radio Bemba. We truly feel the apprehension amongst the musicians, and the fear of going out into the fray unprepared. Manu borrows from Joe Strummer’s lyrical thesaurus to compare touring to warring; Frydman responds by shooting a short segment of the concert as though it were a scene from Apocalypse Now. The frenzied, dizzying camerawork shot handheld on a smoke-filled stage, inches away from the barnstorming performers, and the rapid, rapacious editing truly convey the sensation of being there on stage, initially in the firing line of an expectant crowd of thousands, then caught in the moment of performance, truly lost in music matured by miles of movement.

If I must criticise this, and other shots of the band performing, it is because the sound quality here seems to be equivalent to that of a Dictaphone. Nevertheless, Babylon’s Fever is only one part of the DVD Babylonia en Guagua, whose primary purpose is to offer us one of the band’s live sets. Unfortunately the incredible performances and virtuoso direction is marred by abysmal structuring and bizarre cuts within the songs. An extra on the DVD, Proxima Estacion… Esperanza, by Heinzi Brandner, probes Manu Chao and his fondness for travel, music and left-wing politics more deeply, and is also well-worth a watch if one has taken a liking to the man, and his unimposing, always inspiring approach.