Finding Fela (15 cert, 119 min) ***
Documentarist Alex Gibney senses the ignorance and prejudice he’s up
against in profiling Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti: it’s why Finding Fela opens with concert footage
of its subject instructing one audience that “99% of what you’ve heard about
Africa is wrong”. Gibney’s typically detailed treatment of Kuti’s life and
music offers ample redress, although the filmmaker’s found a curious way of
framing his material, intercutting biography with rehearsals for the 2009
Broadway musical Fela! There’s
director Bill T. Jones, finessing book and lyrics. And look, there’s producers
Jay-Z and Will Smith walking the red carpet! Hang on: where’s Fela gone?
Gibney could argue the show’s inclusion underlines Kuti’s standing, yet
too often he appears distracted by this backstage drama – just as he admitted
to falling for the grand narrative of Lance Armstrong’s planned comeback while
initiating last year’s The Armstrong Lie.
Time and again, Finding Fela returns
us to the sight of a Fela impersonator fronting showbiz-slick re-enactments
that are inevitably less authentic than even the film’s fuzzier archive clips.
Gibney seems scared Kuti’s story needs amplification: that it needs to play to
the back rows if it isn’t heading straight to BBC4.
Funny thing is, when Gibney puts the story centre stage, the film truly
sings. With editor Lindy Jankura, he finds a pulsing, probing rhythm to match
its subject; he’s as comfortable discussing the intricacies of Fela’s extended,
ceremonial, notionally uncommercial beats as he is setting out the particulars
of the Biafran conflict that spawned them. Individual chapters highlight the
racism Kuti faced while touring in the 1960s and 70s and the corruption waiting
for him back home, and Gibney knows he has non-fiction gold on his hands in the
musician’s hectic domestic life (“I wanted to marry 27 girls because I wanted
it to be meaningful”).
Given his yen for unprotected sex (and AIDS-related death in 2007), Kuti
might have joined Armstrong, Elliot Spitzer and Enron’s suits in Gibney’s rogues’ gallery of alpha males doomed by
hubris, but Finding Fela regards him
fondly, as a figure born of complex times: a restless, strutting contradiction
whose roles took in performer, teacher and ambassador as well as seducer, shaman
and sham. Which makes the frequent returns to Broadway even more questionable:
in looking for Fela, why did Gibney settle upon an imposter, when the real deal
was more than compelling enough?
Finding Fela is now playing in selected cinemas.
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