CATCHING FIRE: THE STORY OF ANITA PALLENBERG

Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 2, 2024

According to her son, there were two acts to the life of Anita Pallenberg, but only one of them, apparently, is worth discussing in any depth. That's the takeaway of Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg, which dissects the more famous/infamous, wild, and dramatic part of Pallenberg's life in meticulous, sometimes gossipy detail. The second part, which isn't nearly as sensationalistic, registers as an afterthought here.

That's disappointing, if to be expected, since people are generally more fascinated by what celebrities get up to in their private lives when it's not the mundane things of everyday life. Some famous folks can transcend that morbid curiosity with matters like love affairs, drug use, and running from the law. If the unpublished autobiography that serves as the foundation of this movie is any indication, Pallenberg, who died in 2017 at the age of 75, might have been such a candidate. One doesn't write such a tome without some distance, a lot of self-reflection, and good amount of self-awareness of how far one has come.

The strangest element of this documentary, though, is how directors Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill don't seem to fully trust their subject's own words about, perspective of, and outlook on her own life. It's all there, apparently, in that manuscript, which was found by Pallenberg's children following her death among various documents. The content of the text is certainly enough reason to hire Scarlett Johansson to recite Pallenberg's words, offering a first-person perspective on her life as a muse to the Rolling Stones and a romantic partner to two of the band's founding members.

One of them is Keith Richards, who's still alive and kicking and performing (At one point, Pallenberg notes that the guitarist told her he believes he'll die on stage). The lead six-stringer of the Stones is the father of three children with Pallenberg, and two of them are still alive. Richards and those children, both adults and clearly still wrestling with their upbringing to rock-and-roll parents, are narrators here, too. The kids appear on camera, but Richards only shows up by way of his voice and plenty of archival footage. Based on the testimony of the children and Pallenberg, that's appropriate.

Does the movie need them? That's a question it shouldn't have to answer, because all of these accounts should provide some idea of who Pallenberg was, what she did, and why she's still a figure of some notoriety and a bit of mystery within this particular realm of pop culture. They do, to be sure, but considering the fact that the documentary lingers so long on the particulars of the subject's tumultuous life during the 1960s and '70s, the multiple narrators start to feel like a way of getting as many juicy details as possible.

Obviously, there are a lot of those details. Pallenberg's childhood, for example, passes by in a breeze, as the rebellious child of a well-to-do family, who was born during World War II, dropped out of high school and left home to pursue a modeling and acting career, and, after spending some time among the New York City art scene, ended up in close proximity to the Stones.

At first, she was with Brian Jones, who officially started the rock band, and while the two of them seemed in love, drugs and his violent tendencies pushed Pallenberg away and toward Richards, while it resulted in his death in 1969 at the sinisterly legendary age of 27. Pallenberg herself offers one view, while Richards and singer Marianne Faithfull, who was dating Stones frontman Mick Jagger at the time, have another. They're all pretty much the same, really, and the filmmakers don't seem realize that the same story told over and over again doesn't gain some power in the repetition.

That's essentially the problem with the whole documentary, which becomes redundant in its anecdotes. It's not entirely the filmmakers' fault, since much of Pallenberg's life during this period amounted to difficult (to put it mildly) relationships, rumors and gossip (especially after she starred in a movie with Jagger that involved plenty of sex and nudity), drug use, attempted sobriety, and, after the band gets in trouble for drugs and tax questions, basically living on the lam. The children's perspective is unique, at least, once they're able to discuss the effects of such a lifestyle on their own lives, but eventually, Pallenberg's own words fall away to other people explaining or supposing what things must have been like for her.

It all feels salacious in a way that doesn't offer much insight and definitely bypasses the bulk of Pallenberg's life as soon as, after seeing too many people die and blaming herself for those deaths in some way, she did change her lifestyle. Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg treats that second act of her life as an epilogue of sorts, instead of a key component of her biography and who she might have been following the rock-and-roll days. We have to imagine that, because the movie doesn't seem interested.

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