THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
What a strangely embarrassing film is that of Miri Navasky, a television director who, after subjects devoted to a young serial killer, assisted suicide and trans identity, co-signed with Karen O’Connor and Maeve O’Boyle a documentary devoted to the immense folk artist Joan Baez, now 83 years old. We are a little slow, at first, in discovering the keystone. Divided between the present of his farewell world tour (2019) and the evocation of his long career, the documentary seems to seek its path before showing its cards: it will be, rather than a film paying homage to his vocal genius or the history of his music, an intimate portrait pushed to its most sordid confines.
At the same time as it pushes open the doors of her biography – her commitment to civil rights, her passionate and unhappy relationship with Bob Dylan – the film ventures, with the consent of the person concerned, into thornier and more risky personal paths.
Existential anxiety
A lesser known story emerges there, which is that of a life based on deep existential anxiety, itself linked to a founding traumatic event, of which the film organizes, in a concerted and all the more embarrassing way, the slow dramatic assumption.
Diaries from childhood, home movies, recorded period conversations, family psychotherapy sessions, and the confession of Joan Baez herself weave a dirty story. That of a dysfunctional family first, in which the exceptional preeminence of Joan would have led her two sisters, Pauline and Mimi, to develop two diametrically opposed attitudes towards her, but no less antagonistic: flight for the first, competition mark of jealousy for the second. Not even the singer’s son, the percussionist Gabriel Harris, complains in retrospect that his mother devoted more time to ” save the world “ than to himself.
The trail of this general malaise gradually ends up going back to Joan’s father, Albert, a renowned physicist of Mexican origin, in a sort of apotheosis that leaves us wondering. According to the younger sister Mimi, Albert kissed her on the mouth. He then allegedly behaved inappropriately during a nap with Joan. Recorded tapes show that the parents fiercely denied these acts. The mother, in her diary, mentions the “false memory syndrome”.
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