This is a review of Let’s Get Lost (1988)
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20 November
This is a review of Let’s Get Lost (1988)
Referenced in a review of Orion : The Man Who Would Be King (2015) - to help to demonstrate that film's superiority (in telling a musician's life and handling the conflicts of pursuing a career) - Let’s Get Lost (1988) is a film about jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker. (It appears not to have been screened in the UK until 6 June 2008 (at Cambridge Film Festival).)
It can hardly be accused of being over adulatory, in the way that Iris (2014) or Mavis ! (2015) easily appear to be, but it had the luxury of working with a subject who was no longer living, but whom it had shot in the year before his death. Yet one probably thinks too much of its possible influence, if one conceives that its portrayal of him as a bad cat could have affected people in the way that his music (or recordings of it) did and have continued to do.
For reasons that seem questionable (and in footage not obviously falsified by its context), it dished up to us images of Baker, then 58, being schmoozed by two attractive women, seemingly fans, in the back of an open-topped car, or on the dodgems. If one did not know of his life, this proved not to be candid documentary-filming of a jazzer’s celebrity life-style, but a directorially conceived treat for Baker – in reference to which, much later on, we hear him sounding unduly thankful :
It is as if ‘treating’ him in this way, when he is open that he likes getting stoned** (which may indicate a suggestible personality ?), licenses other footage where, for example, he is patently on camera with the film-makers, but is, for no very good reason, shown glamour shots of naked (or near-naked) women, and invited to comment. One feels for Baker, involved in some sort of tribute to him that does not seem very bothered about whether it even appears to be exploiting him, but he does have enough composure simply to remark nice-looking ladies : maybe, more than twenty-five years later, ethical considerations are different about one’s documentary subject, but it is not as if one does not hear the film-makers (they are good enough to allow us) talking to Baker in a way where one must reasonably doubt that they can be unaware where the balance of power lies.
In reviewing Orion, the laboured artiness of this film’s look was critiqued, but it even extends to mimicking what Hitchcock does, after Norman Bates’ (Anthony Perkins’) attack in Psycho (1960), with Marion Crane’s (Janet Leigh’s) eye, taking us right up to it, and then rotating it, so that it resembles less an eye than a vulva. A victory of form over significant content ? Well, in those terms (even if that reference seems gratuitous, it is momentary), its ‘style’ is not the worst of the excesses of the film :
For no apparent reason (other than that, amongst everyone else, he eventually mentions Baker ?), screen-time is taken with a rambling interview with actor Lawrence Trimble, name-dropping in a slow way about when he was in Paris and drifting around the jazz-club Le Chat Qui Pêche, and the likes of Bud Powell. On one level, by being allowed to go on so long, Trimble hangs himself, but so could, probably, any of the others in Chet Baker’s life – and except that, unlike with them, neither the film, nor Trimble seems to trouble to establish what connection he had with Baker (except as another name). Writers have their treasured phrases / sentences, but they sooner or later refuse, however delightful they are, to find a place where they fit, and have to go : this interview, for similar reasons, should never have made this self-indulgent cut, where one did not take long to start hoping that there was less of it, not more, to see.
The discussion of this film in the review of Orion wants to point up how Let’s Get Lost also keeps ringing the changes on the message in what one interviewee has said (Diane Vavra, as one recalls ?) : You’ll never really know when Chet is being sincere. So, rather than considering, in equivalent depth, other matters such as the super footage (courtesy of Pathé) of Baker’s appearance at Cannes Film Festival in 1987 (the year before his death), it hops around - guiding you, in these juxtapositions, only by how he looks at any time – from young Baker, to much younger, to older (though, during a recording session, we do hear much of the song ‘Imagination is funny’). Just because it can (?), it interweaves these moments with critiques of him as a person, from those who want to say what , beneath a surface, he was ‘really like’.
As with the arty appearance, the film may be of its time in that it presents a male friend who tells how Baker supplanted him in his fractional absence from sexual intercourse, and, consequently, how that satisfied partner (still having thought that it was he) always wants to go to bed with him, but the story, if it even sounded plausible, is obviously of a double-edged variety : although Baker is thereby credited as a titanic lover, it is in the context of being painted as unscrupulous and opportunistic, and only fortuitously ‘benefiting’ the persons whom he had wronged (one of whom, somehow (?), remained unaware). Yet were we watching this ‘account’ to be Baker’s moral judge, or to learn something relevant to his trumpet-playing and singing ?
The review of Orion touched on the status of Jacqueline du Pré as a musician versus what we are required to concentrate on in Hilary and Jackie (1998), where Emily Watson plays her in the role of being the sister of Hilary du Pré-Finzi (Rachel Griffiths) - with all that is entailed for their relationships, both with each other, and with others : quite in tune with the story about Chet Baker jumping into bed with a woman and assuming the narrator’s place...
Rather strenuously, with what Let’s Get Lost chooses to show, almost no stone seemed to have been left unturned to say that, with Baker performing a song, the experiences that resulted from the occasion were not felt by him in that moment, but were a calculated and manipulative act. In this respect, though, when we hear ‘eager’ questions - such as asking how many wives he has had - from those surrounding him, as he is being filmed for this project, we know that they already know, and that they are just ‘acting dumb’ in the enquiry and with their responses. Or, when Bruce Weber and his editor are deciding to give us a moment that has been caught where Baker says I’m always looking for my lighter, placing it*** in such a way in the film so that it sounds ‘significant’ and noteworthy, not just banal : if Baker was pretending to feel an emotion in a song, film itself is an even bigger constructed reality.
[...]
End-notes
* What is that (song ?) reference ?
** One interviewee talks about when Baker and she ‘got lost on a sail-boat’, thereby explicating the film’s title.
*** Both at what point (how far in / in what other company) in the film, and how the scene is contextualized within itself (what came before the remark, to frame it, and how is it allowed to hang in the air)...
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
