Punk poetry

Patti Smith: Dream of Life is peculiar,
frustrating and beautiful

ACCESSIBLE ICON: Smith

by MALCOLM FRASER

Fashion photographer Steven Sebring had the good fortune and sense to start capturing footage of punk poet/icon Patti Smith in 1996, just as she was emerging from her 16-year self-imposed exile from the music business. Sebring spent 10 years on and off filming Smith, her band, her two children and various seemingly off-the-cuff interview segments. The resulting documentary, Dream of Life, is a peculiar, beautiful, frustrating and powerful film that touches on mortality, loss and sacrifice along with politics, music and art.

The biographical details of Smith’s life are dispensed with in the first five minutes in a voice-over monologue. The hurried pace of the bio, and Smith’s uncommonly stilted delivery, suggest that this may have been done out of a concession to viewers’ desire for a narrative arc. Whether or not this is the case, the rest of the film makes no such concession, opting instead for a collage that skips back and forth through various periods of Smith’s life, addressing different themes along the way.

Sebring uses no narration or onscreen text, and like Julien Temple in last year’s Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, he doesn’t identify anyone in the film, forcing viewers to make connections on their own. When fellow icons like Philip Glass and Sam Shepard appear uncredited, it gives the film a somewhat uncomfortable sense of elitism, but generally the decision adds to the film’s unique atmosphere and its commendable refusal to dumb down for its audience.

The decade-long scope of the film does more than give the viewer unusual access (and the experience of watching Smith’s children grow from kids to young adults); it seems to have given Sebring licence to turn his focus away from generic documentary style towards a poetic assembly of fleeting moments that become memorably beautiful.

The film could have comfortably lost 10 minutes; its rambling structure creates a number of false endings and the occasional sense of “where is this going?” (especially a scene near the end where Smith and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea discuss at length their inability to hold their bladders). But the portrait of Smith’s uncompromising integrity is inspiring, and Sebring’s boldly unique approach makes the film a low-key triumph

PATTI SMITH: DREAM OF LIFE
OPENS THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 31