Post by Admin on Sept 7, 2014 11:24:55 GMT -4
In "Memphis," Willis Earl Beal plays a restless musician who can't find what he's looking for in either sex or religion.
Everything is artifice,” declares Willis (Willis Earl Beal), the melancholy, creatively blocked singer, songwriter and restless dreamer at the heart of “Memphis,” a soulful cinematic tone poem written and directed by Tim Sutton. This luminescent second feature from Mr. Sutton was inspired partly by the legend of O. V. Wright, an African-American blues and gospel singer who had several R&B hits in the 1960s and early ’70s and died in 1980 at 41.
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MemphisSEPT. 5, 2014
Willis, a singer and songwriter who fears he is losing his creative mojo, follows Wright’s footsteps in this intensely atmospheric tour of the poorer section of Memphis. He is preparing to go into the recording studio, but his muse has deserted him. Searching for salvation, he visits the Peace Baptist Church, whose preacher urges him to embrace evangelical Christianity. His domestic partnership with a beautiful woman is passionate but fragile. One of the film’s most despairing speeches is Willis’s soliloquy about the failure of sex to bring the kind of transcendence he’s seeking.
The mood of the film suggests a quasi-religious séance in which Mr. Sutton acts as a conjurer of elusive truths about the city and its heady musical culture. (A Brooklyn filmmaker, Mr. Sutton won acclaim on the festival circuit for his first movie, “Pavilion,” a moody study of aimless teenagers.) Every image in “Memphis” quivers with a poetic intensity that captures the beauty and desolation of the urban South not pictured on tourist postcards.
The collective imagery makes for a steamy, pungent cultural soup: children riding bicycles; the moon in various phases; slow freight trains whose mournful whistles evoke the great Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer standard “Blues in the Night”; the appearances of Willis’s older sidekick, a one-legged musician with a face of holy man; musicians making strange sounds in a recording studio; and gospel services where Willis resists surrendering to the euphoria surrounding him.
So what exactly is this swirl of doleful reveries, eerie music and folklore trying to convey as its forlorn central character wanders through the byways of the city? With digital cinematography by Chris Dapkins that imbues everything it surveys with a mystical clarity, “Memphis” suggests a search for an ineffable truth that Willis, who describes himself as a wizard and a believer in sorcery, can neither name nor describe.
What that might be is hinted at in a fragment of Mr. Beal’s original song “Blue Escape,” a ballad reminiscent of “Unchained Melody,” that he sings in a fervent folk-gospel tenor. His journey eventually leads him into the woods, where he camps out under spreading oaks beside a stream. In a setting that suggests an enchanted forest, he bides his time until a revelation of what he calls “glory” appears.
Memphis
Opens on Friday
Written and directed by Tim Sutton; director of photography, Chris Dapkins; edited by Seth Bomse; music by Willis Earl Beal; production design by Bart Mangrum; produced by John Baker; released by Kino Lorber. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.
WITH: Willis Earl Beal.
C
