Whats the darkest moment youve ever seen in a rock n roll documentary? Up until now, Id have said the answer was obvious: the sequence in Gimme Shelter where Meredith Hunter, in his lime-green suit, rushes the stage at Altamont with a gun in his hand and gets stabbed in the back, half a dozen times, by a member of the Hells Angels. For pure heart of darkness, what could top that? But Ive just seen Anita, Svetlana Zill and Alexis Blooms very good documentary about Anita Pallenberg beautiful and imperious scenester of the 60s and 70s, Hollywood actress and icon of scruffy-chic rock royalty, wife of Keith Richards, muse to several of the other Rolling Stones. And theres a moment in it that made me suck in my breath in shock and horror as much as Gimme Shelter does.
The year is 1976. Keith and Anita have been living as a slovenly, decadent version of a domestic family unit. Were heard their lives described, with disarming honesty, by Anita, whose words are taken from the manuscript of Black Magic, an autobiography she wrote but never published. (Its read as narration by Scarlett Johansson.) Keith and Anitas son, Marlon Leon Sundeep, is 6 years old (his two middle names carry the initials LSD, la Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds). Their daughter, Dandelion Angela, is just three. Mired in drugs (acid, cocaine, heroin) and known around the world for it, to the point that its hard for them to find a place that will have them, Keith and Anita have moved their family dozens of times; theyre now living in Geneva. On March 6, Anita gives birth to their third child, a son named Tara Jo, and Keith goes on the road for his latest tour with the Stones.
Anita is left behind to care for the infant all by herself. She feels distraught and abandoned. She is using hard drugs. On June 6, when the baby is just 10 weeks old, he dies. It is pronounced a crib death (what would come to be called SIDS). The Swiss doctors told me it wasnt my fault, writes Anita. But if I had been more together, could I have done something? The viewer cant help but wonder if the answer is yes.
I havent gotten to the darkest part. Thats where Keith, on the day he learns the tragic news, is scheduled to play a concert with the Stones. The other band members tell him he shouldn he doesnt need to perform. But Keith insists. And we see footage of that concert. Heres Keith, in all his hooligan brashness, cool as a cucumber onstage, churning out the guitar solo to Honky Tonk Women. And we cant put this together in our heads with what just happened. Richards has explained that if he didnt perform that night, he thought he might have shot himself. Yet his the-show-must-go-on compartmentalization still looks cruelly inexplicable. And it ties into the larger portrait of life presented by Anita.
If there is any clich phrase thats now so cloying it can make your skin crawl, its sex, drugs, and rock n roll. Taken together, those words have come to symbolize something paralyzing in its banality: the youth hedonism of a certain era and more than that thefacile way we tend to think of it. Of course, its not as if that ethos ever went away. (Now its Tinder, drugs, and nightclub EDM.) Sex, drugs, and rock n roll has been the lifeblood of our free culture for 50 years. In its overly institutionalized way, its probably more unhinged now than it was then.
Nevertheless, when you say the phrase, youre imparting a certain mythology to a certain lifestyle. Youre saying, implicitly, Sex, drugs, and rock n roll. Whats not to like? Whats missing from the phrase is any hint of how the holy credo of hedonism bred a culture of recklessness. I dont mean to come off like a right-wing scold. I still believe (who doesnt?) in the liberating power of pleasure. But the truth is that the 60s and 70s opened the door to all kinds of spiritual and physical destruction that we probably dont talk about as much as we should, and Anita, as a documentary, is about all of that. As filmmakers, Zill and Bloom want to celebrate everything that made Anita Pallenberg a feminine force ahead of her time. And they do. But they also show you that Anita and Keith had a complex relationship that was a crazy doom spiral.
In addition to Pallenbergs memoir, the film is built around a towering archive of home-movie footage, so that we often feel like were right there with Anita and Keith, seeing who they were offstage and off-camera; we experience the sweet tranquility of lives being lived. Pallenberg met the Stones in 1965, when they were giving a concert in Munich (back in the era, she says, before Mick was dancing; he was still playing the maracas). Anita soon became involved with Brian Jones, who she thought was the most beautiful of the Stones, and the most charismatic.
Anita herself, as we see, was a fount of charisma. She had done some modeling (which turned out to be not her thing), and she was one of those Olympian women of the 60s who strode into a room and commanded it. With her bangs, regal cheekbones, and voracious broad smile, she looked like Nico and Carly Simon and Marilyn Chambers. Ive been called a witch, a slut, and a murderer, she tells us in the narration, and though shes referencing ways shes been dismissed, even those testify to her power. We hear clips of Keith talking about how she was a woman not to be crossed.
She was Italian and German and spoke in a Continental accent that added to her lan. In 1963, when she was 19, she escaped to New York, where she found a place in the downtown art scene (I washed Jasper Johns brushes), until she linked up with the Stones. By the early 70s, married to Keith, shed become one of the casual inventors of post-counterculture rock style, because the clothes that Keith had become celebrated for wearing (the scarves, furs, and ambisexual shirts) were mostly hers. Thats what infused his slovenly pirate thing with such style.
Pallenberg was an actress, and a good one. We see clips of her in Barbarella (1968), an otherwise preposterous movie, but she played a tyrannical heavy and made her presence felt. From the ridiculous to the sublime, she co-starred in Performance (1970), one of the most important films of the era, and though the set was awash in drugs, that was part of what the movie was about the new decadence as aristocratic lifestyle. She had a brief dalliance with Mick Jagger at the time but drew away from him. If you watch Performance now, youll see that Pallenbergs own performance is excellent. But Keith didnt want her to act or to do anything that could add up to a career. He was that kind of possessive old-school bad-boy-as-chauvinist. She agreed to his demands and shut herself down. If she hadnt, Pallenberg might have been a major presence in the movies of the 70s.
She had the potential to be an artist, but its partly because the creative process never became front and center for her that Anita is such a unique rock-world documentary: a portrait of the life itself. Starting from the time they lived at Nellcte, the rented villa in the south of France where the Stones recorded Exile on Main St., and where theyd escaped to avoid paying British taxes, Anita and Keiths lives plunged into chaos. Nellcte was a party of hangers-on that never stopped, and once the recording sessions were over, Keith and Anita moved 20 times in 3 years; according to Marlon, he could never hold onto a set of toys. They barely furnished the homes, but for Keith everything was secondary to making music. And the drugs produced a torpor that became their normality, which Anita talks about with indelible candor. Keith, like the other Stones (well, except for Brian Jones), possessed the constitution of a survivor. But they left a trail of wreckage.
We hear more dark tales, culminating in the infamous 1979 incident in which Scott Cantrell, a 17-year-old part-time groundsman at Keith and Anitas estate in South Salem, NY, killed himself with a gun at their house. He and Anita had been sexually involved, and according to Pallenberg they were watching The Deer Hunter, where the Russian roulette sequences inspired Cantrell to take out Keiths gun and give the game a go. Pallenberg was never accused of legal wrongdoing, but the incident shadowed her. There followed more addiction, though now she was going into the scuzzpit of Alphabet City to score, and stealing money from friends.
Yet Anita, in her way, was a survivor too. She cleaned up and stayed sober for 14 years. (She died in 2017, at 75, due to complications from hepatitis C.) You watch Anita and think of what she could have accomplished had it not been for the drugs. But, of course, its never that simple, since the documentary captures how Pallenbergs willingness to push everything to the edge and over it was inextricable from her cracked glamour. Anita is a vital portrait, but its the current of devastation that makes it essential.