Celebrity bashes

Keeping tabs on Rainer and Mick

Tabloid-journalist tactics are getting a sour press these days, but I abstain from fingerwagging. What choice? The wonderful Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive through October (take the month off from work and go, go, go!) transports me back to my finest paparazzo moment.

It was a New York Film Festival some years ago, and the usually sulky, antisocial West German filmmaker had agreed, reluctantly, to submit to a few days of interviews for whatever was his newest picture. (Lili Marleen, perhaps?) Excited scribes signed up for every slot: how often did you get to speak one-on-one with this genius enfant terrible?

My talk with Fassbinder must have been his only Q&A on the first morning. He was sassy, combative, but I got some good original stuff. However, I had no photo. An hour after, my photographer and I were walking outside Lincoln Center, and there was the leather-jacketed filmmaker on a street corner, puffing a cigarette and devouring an open New York Times. He was out of the public eye, certainly wishing to be undisturbed.

"Quick! Take his picture!", I growled at my photographer. So she edged up to him and, leaning close, began to click away. Invading his space.

He looked up from his paper, very annoyed. She took more photos. Click! Click! In his face. Finally the perturbed filmmaker threw down his cigarette, flung away his newspaper, hailed a taxi, jumped in, and disappeared.

How angry was Fassbinder? He never returned to the festival! He hid out somewhere in New York, and all the other interviews, days of them, had to be cancelled. Poor journalists, I shook my head sadly, as I typed up -- by default! -- my exclusive interview!

No, I never informed anyone then that I knew very well why Fassbinder had vanished. (Bad, bad!)

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Now that i'm celeb-bragging: I partied with Mick last month, at the Toronto International Film Festival. Well, sort of: I was at a restaurant bash, sponsored by Miramax Films, that Mr. Jagger likewise attended. I gawked; he conversed with Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein.

I was standing behind Mick, thinking profoundly, "He's taller than you expect," when a strange thing happened. A waitress from the restaurant walked by and, shamelessly, goosed him. Surprised, but not pleasantly surprised, Mick jumped. The waitress giggled and strolled on through. She has a hot story someday for her grandchildren. Incident concluded.

A day later, though, I started to wonder. A double standard? What if it had been a waiter (male) goosing, say, Courtney Love? Would he have been arrested?

October 12 at the Brattle, you can see Jagger in his most famous movie role as a Tim Curried androgyne ex-rocker in Performance (1970). The film is a confusing, bombastic mess, but Jagger in PJs wears sweet lipstick and strums mean acoustic guitar.

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The famous confront colonialism in two films at the MFA, Isaac Julien's Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, from England (October 10, 11, and 16), and Bassek Ba Kobhio's Le Grand Blanc de Lambaréné, from Cameroon (October 10, 11, and 17).

Julien's is much the better film, especially when it tells in straight documentary fashion the inspiring story of Martinique's Fanon, who started a life of political commitment as an anti-Vichy Resistance fighter. Settled in France and pursuing psychiatry, Fanon became an ardent revolutionary, forging a key connection between rescuing a mental patient from madness and freeing the Third World from colonialist rule. Author of the classic tome The Wretched of the Earth, friend of Sartre and Beauvoir, Fanon emigrated to Algeria when it was under harsh French rule, renouncing his French citizenship to support Algerian armed struggle for independence.

Julien includes lively interviews with Fanon's still-living brother, and with Martinique literary intellectuals. There's also superb commentary by British black-cultural-studies theorist Stuart Hall.

The film falters, however, whenever there are acted episodes. The beautiful person standing in for Fanon, Colin Salmon, seems better suited to modeling, and there are histrionic pseudo-thespians cavorting about as supposed Algerian torture victims. Besides, Julien's gay-and-black activist agenda seems imposed on this non-gay bio -- e.g., a scene in which Salmon-as-Fanon watches two black men soul-kissing.

Le Grand Blanc de Lambaréné is a dreadful fictional film about Albert Schweitzer's years running a hospital in Africa. The filmmaker doesn't know what he thinks of the Nobel Prizer, whether he should praise the good doctor for ministering to black Africans or debunk him as a publicity-seeking racist colonialist. The Schweitzer on screen has no historic reality and, as overplayed by Andre Wilms, no interiority. He's mostly a prudish grouch, though he sure loves to pound out Bach on his organ. The sole glamorous thespian is Marisa Berenson, miscast as Schweitzer's suffering wife.

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A good-luck goodbye to Sasha Berman, the intelligent and organized artistic director at the Coolidge Corner, who's resigning to move to New York. Greetings to Chantal Akerman, ace Belgian feminist/experimentalist, who's teaching filmmaking this year at Harvard's Carpenter Center.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary[a]phx.com.