☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Pavements (2024) – A. R. Perry
One of the reviews
on Letterboxd suggests that a viewer at a film festival needed to google
Pavement to learn about the band – if this is you, this is not your movie.
However, if you’re like me, owning all of their records which were on steady
rotation back in the day (and therefore virtually memorised), then Pavements
will be something of a trippy experience. Or let’s just say director Alex Ross
Perry capitalises on the sense of absurdity and ridiculousness that was an
undercurrent in the band’s work (so if that’s also something that brings a smirk
to your face, I say go for it). The film has 4 or 5 strands all interwoven but
skilfully edited to provide not just an historical narrative of the band but an
emotional one which crescendos at the end, celebrating Pavement’s 2022 reunion
shows (which I somehow skipped here in Melbourne; but did see Malkmus’s
subsequent emergence in The Hard Quartet this year). We see scenes of the band rehearsing
for the reunion as well as clips from the past, all the way back to the
beginning, but we never get a complete song – everything is excerpts, offering
tantalising primes that trigger longer memories and complete versions of unplayed
songs as earworms. Everything else in the film is a form of fiction, a staged “meta”
take on the “what if” aspect of the Pavement story, as in “what if” they
actually became as famous as contemporaries Nirvana. In that fan-fiction future, there’s a
Pavement museum in NYC – we see the gallery opening featuring other Matador
bands playing Pavement songs (snippets only, naturally), and an array of celebs
(Thurston Moore et al.) mingling with the members of Pavement and the assorted
hipsterati, amongst the many (catalogued) artefacts (t-shirts and weirder) from
the band’s past. It seems that this event really happened, but how staged it
was is hard to say (clearly there is no such museum). Weirder still, the producers may have really
issued a call for auditions for a proposed Pavement stage musical (“Slanted! Enchanted!”)
– we see earnest Broadway wannabes singing their hearts out via Gold Soundz and
a few dance numbers (cringeworthy, yes, but fitting in some way?). It’s
possible to see Stephen Malkmus’s guiding hand behind some of this, as absurdly
self-mocking as it seems. The final strand is the hardest to digest and the
most distancing (at least for this viewer – is it Brechtian?). To provide more
narrative grit to the Pavement story (and align it with the cliches of the music
doc?), and again as a kind of fan-fiction, we are treated to a parallel version
of the band’s story in which Spiral Stairs (Scott Kannberg, played by Nat Wolff)
is bitter about the band’s lack of success, Malkmus (played by Joe Keery) is
visibly alienated from the possibility of fame, and there’s a faux climax
focused on Lollapalooza’s mud-slinging incident which leads to an intense band discussion
(in contrast to the reality of the band laughing in the green room after the
incident which is shown in split-screen). The producers cast actors in the role of band
members and relevant record label execs (Tim Heidecker as Gerard Cosloy; Jason
Schwarzman as Chris Lombardi; founders of Matador records who also appear as
themselves) and we see actors preparing for their roles by emulating historic
footage of the band (e.g., using a voice coach to get Malkmus’s vocal fry just
right and examining a photo of his tongue) which takes us further into bizarro-world.
Ultimately, the film offers an opportunity for an extended (128 minutes)
meditation/reverie on the band (with Perry using all the cinematic techniques
at his disposal to keep it interesting), if that’s what yer looking for; if you
don’t know the band, I suspect the film would be nearly incomprehensible. I haven’t
pulled this out for a while but for a straight-up documentary of the band you
might try Lance Bangs’ Slow Century (2002). For my part, I enjoyed these
moments of (self-)indulgence.
