Rent Billie (2019)

Mixed Bag but well worth a look - Billie review by PD

This one begins as it means to go on - by talking, not of Billie Holiday, but of Linda Lipnack Kuehl, a journalist who in 1971 embarked on a biography of the Billie and died in 1978 - suicide, according to the police, murder, according to others. So we have two films in one based on two different people, and whilst it's an intriguing premise, to my mind the execution is at best clumsy and at worst significantly detracts from the lives of both people.

Kuehl amassed a formidable research archive, including tape recordings of interviews with Holiday’s collaborators, friends, lovers etc. Some of her work was used in subsequent published biographies, but the film's director, James Erskine, acquired the rights to her entire collection, and “Billie” is the result. It's a fairly sympathetic review of Billie's life, packed with incident, much of it pretty disturbing, but the film plausibly insists that she also lived her 'high life' with a level of proud ostentation, and the suggestion of a masochistic self-destructive instinct is particularly convincing. And while the parallel lives are rather awkwardly done, Eskine's handling of Keuhl’s interviews are pretty good - what’s said on the tapes often kicks us in the gut. Some of her white collaborators speak of Holiday condescendingly, whilst the legendary drummer Jo Jones seethes with an anger at Holiday’s exploiters you can still feel decades after the fact. But she isn't, crucially, portrayed as 'victim', which I'm sure she would have approved of.

Another weakness is that the film gives short shrift to subject’s artistry; there's just nowhere near enough of the music. There's some great moments - particularly the soul-piercing 'Strange Fruit' - but unfortunately the (admittedly terribly difficult) need to match the persona along with the art simply doesn't happen here. That all said, it's a great watch on the whole, and both fans and onlookers alike will find much to think about. Well worth a look.

Interesting documentary - Billie review by TH

I was interested to find out more about Billie Holiday and found this to be fairly interesting. Will this go down as a classic possibly not but anyone interested in a musical icon and music history will enjoy this.

Press Record - Billie review by CH

Many have told Billie Holiday's life, and some have criticised Billie (2020) for not simply doing so again. Its great interest is showing how such a life can, or cannot, come to be chronicled. In 1971, at thirty, a New York journalist, Linda Kuehl, from a Jewish background, decided to set about a biography of her. The process involved tracing and recording many of those who had known the singer.

Throughout this film, directed/assembled by James Erskine, the camera closes in for a few minutes upon a cassette recorder while somebody - a musician, a pimp, a producer, a narcotics agent, and more - recalls incidents, warmly, cantankerously. Surprising how well these tapes have endured (there are subtitles throughout for these recollections). Amidst all this is archive film of Billie, including some of that wonderful performance fro Granada television in England soon before she died (one must regret the colourisation as the price to be paid for the documentary being made).

Of course, research became Linda Kuehl's master. She was forever on the trail, and in thrall (and more) to some of those whom she found (including Count Basie). These cassettes have been used in biographies of Holiday (those by Donald Clarke and Julia Blackburn) but it is something else to hear them - and to reflect that a biographer has his or her life while giving so much of the day to somebody else's. (Michael Holroyd has said that he saw little of the turbulent Sixties while writing the life of Lytton Strachey.) Here, in Billie, are home-movie glimpses of Linda Kuehl in a bikini on the beach, in the waves, seemingly happy.

What happened? Soon after her thirty-eighth birthday she was found dead at night on the pavement outside a Washington hotel. The police deemed it suicide. Her family doubt this. She was found in the night cream which she always applied to her face before sleep. Who would do so before suicide? A noir aspect, akin to the terrible end of Billie herself.

We are now much further from her death than she was from Billie's. Time works strangely, and we must be glad that her cassettes - and her time - did not go to waste.