Grace Jones: Blood­light and Bami

What a bizarre movie this is. It is a light­ly exper­i­men­tal, pur­pose­ful­ly ram­bling por­trait of the Jamaican singer and fash­ion icon Grace Jones for­mu­lat­ed over 10 years by the film­mak­er Sophie Fiennes. It is dis­creet and dis­arm­ing, jerk­ing sud­den­ly between scenes of almost dead­pan com­ic tor­por and ter­ri­fy­ing flamboyance.

Super­fi­cial plea­sures, mem­o­rable moments and ins­ta-talk­ing points are notable by their absence. But this is more about cap­tur­ing a per­sona than it is her sto­ry. One hang­er-on retir­ing with Jones back stage asks if she would hit him the way she famous­ly struck the TV pre­sen­ter Rus­sell Har­ty live on air. The chill­ing, con­tem­pla­tive silence she leaves after his request is far more vio­lent than any act of phys­i­cal abuse.

Blood­light and Bami is a film which has lit­tle inter­est in reel­ing off facts, offer­ing dis­con­nect­ed slabs of con­text or allow­ing the sub­ject to use the cam­era as a means to unload her world­view. That’s not to say that Jones isn’t hyper aware of the fact that she’s got a lens trained on her, but the state of being per­pet­u­al­ly bathed in the lime­light (and how that can affect a per­son) is what the film is about.

It’s noth­ing like the artist hagiogra­phies that seem to drop down the chute week­ly, and it’s not a straight up con­cert film, even though it’s scat­tered with (bor­ing­ly filmed) live per­for­mances. The film it recalls is the deeply uncom­fort­able pro­file of David Bowie made in 1975 for the BBC’s Imag­ine… series called Crack­er Actor in which he sits, mon­ged out of his mind, and rat­tles off his sur­pris­ing­ly coher­ent the­o­ry about how Bowie is noth­ing more than a the­atri­cal construct.

And through­out this film Jones appears to assume mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ties and slides seam­less­ly into dif­fer­ent set­tings. It’s instant­ly strik­ing that she is some­one who always tries to meld into a back­drop, despite being one of the most aes­thet­i­cal­ly dis­tinc­tive celebri­ties of the mod­ern era.

When meet­ing with her par­ents in Jamaica, she sits and eats fish from a plas­tic bas­ket and assumes a Jamaican patois. Then, lat­er, when in Paris per­form­ing her dis­co hit ​‘La Vie En Rose’ on what appears to be a cheapo shiny-floor light enter­tain­ment show, she slips between speak­ing French, and Eng­lish with a slight French lilt. And when she arrives in New York for a gig, she applies her make-up, sips Cham­pagne and talks like a pure Soho lifer.

Some moments bor­der on the banal, and scenes often run and run to the point of tedi­um. It’s hard to know why a shot of Jones whin­ing at pro­duc­ers Sly & Rob­bie down the phone remains in the film despite the fun­ny sound of her British assis­tant beg­ging her to not piss them off. Despite the fact that this is some­thing of a shape­less morass, Fiennes does leave you – pos­si­bly by stealth – with a full and metic­u­lous impres­sion of this charis­mat­ic and excep­tion­al­ly intel­li­gent diva. And it’s a very dif­fer­ent Grace Jones to the one you think you know already.