Paul Thomas Anderson’s Junun is a minia­ture miracle

Too often con­cert movies or album mak­ing-of films come across as func­tion­al pro­mo­tion­al tie-ins, geared entire­ly towards the sale of mer­chan­dise, tick­ets or the per­son­al brand of some pout­ing rock deity. Though Paul Thomas Anderson’s 54 minute doc­u­men­tary, Junun, does make you want to enter into a cor­po­rate voy­age of dis­cov­ery and pur­chase the album whose cre­ation it chron­i­cles, it does so in the most del­i­cate­ly whim­si­cal, care­free and rev­er­en­tial way imaginable.

Fol­low­ing his press duties for Inher­ent Vice dur­ing the ear­ly months of 2015, Ander­son upped sticks and yomped over to the Mehran­garh Fort in Rajasthan with flop­py fringed broth­er-in-arms and mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist, Jon­ny Green­wood, to observe the par­tic­u­lars of a fiery musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tion he entered into with Israeli com­pos­er Shye Ben Tzur and local musi­cal troupe, The Rajasthan Express.

Whether Ander­son knew he was plan­ning to doc­u­ment this record­ing ses­sion remains thrilling­ly ambigu­ous through­out, as Junun comes across as a ram­shackle exam­ple of a PTA cine-impro­vi­sa­tion, reveal­ing a side of this exact­ing for­mal­ist that’s sel­dom been seen in pub­lic (well, maybe in his on-stage Q&As?). Instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion is yield­ed from the amaz­ing music being cre­at­ed; surg­ing, brass-dri­ven cacoph­o­nies which pum­mel the lis­ten­er into a tem­po­rary trance. Unlike Radiohead’s pre­cise­ly ren­dered math rock, this music is unwieldy and pri­mal, redefin­ing what is meant by a ​“mis­take” as trum­peters occa­sion­al­ly fail to hit a note force­ful­ly, or a part might enter into the fray half-a-beat too tardy.

The film, too, embraces ​“mis­takes”, often trans­form­ing them into their own lyri­cal for­mal coups. At one point, a cam­era set on a tri­pod sta­t­i­cal­ly pho­tographs the band in full flow, then the cam­era oper­a­tor picks it up – tri­pod and all – and plants it down across the room, and with­out so much as cur­so­ry adjust­ment, achieves the most per­fect deep-focus fram­ing you could ever desire. Again, though, there’s no real evi­dence that Ander­son is self-con­scious­ly attempt­ing to match the form to the con­tent – it’s an exam­ple of the best type of doc­u­men­tary, where a direc­tor sim­ply reacts to his imme­di­ate surroundings.

Aside from the invig­o­rat­ing per­for­mance footage, we are allowed a few trips out­side of the fort. One involves a lit­tle sojourn into the sur­round­ing neigh­bour­hood to see how the musi­cians tune their instru­ments, which comes across like some­thing out of an ear­ly Wong Kar-Wai movie. There are also trips sky­ward on PTA’s toy drone which he flies over and around the roof of the fort, often as local birds cir­cle one of the tur­rets await­ing a feed­ing ses­sion of raw meat. The aer­i­al footage is breath­tak­ing, and an exam­ple of what tech­nol­o­gy can do when used in the right way and by the right people.

Ander­son has cit­ed Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day, which doc­u­ment­ed the 1958 New­port Jazz Fes­ti­val, as one of his key inspi­ra­tions. As that film fond­ly high­light­ed the schism between a pre­dom­i­nant­ly white, bour­geois audi­ence and a musi­cal style born out of a his­to­ry of black hard­ship, Junun too draws a seri­ous cross-cul­tru­al con­nec­tion. The oth­er film it resem­bles is Jean Luc-Godard’s 1968 chron­i­cle of Rolling Stones’ record­ing ses­sions, Sym­pa­thy For The Dev­il, specif­i­cal­ly in its focus on white appro­pri­a­tion of black/​foreign art­forms, but also on the process of cre­ation rather than a cel­e­bra­tion of a final, saleable product.

In terms of Anderson’s own back cat­a­logue, maybe place this one togeth­er with his own sur­vey of the dis­co era, Boo­gie Nights, with Green­wood stand­ing in as explorato­ry rock music’s very own Dirk Diggler.

Junun is avail­able to stream now on mubi​.com