Iain Softley (1994)
Film4 put some money into Nowhere Boy so it was no coincidence that I came back from seeing it on Sunday to find Backbeat showing that evening on television. (Each commercial break in the Film4 screening included a trailer for Sam Taylor-Wood’s movie.) It was chronologically convenient to see the two films in this sequence: apart from a brief (but resonant) prologue, Backbeat picks up virtually at the point that Nowhere Boy ends – as the Beatles embark on their first residency in Hamburg in 1960. Iain Softley’s film ends in mid-1962 (shortly before Pete Best was fired from the band and replaced by Ringo). It focuses on the relationships between John Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe and Sutcliffe’s German girlfriend, the photographer Astrid Kirchherr. Softley wrote the screenplay with Michael Thomas and Stephen Ward; according to Wikipedia, it’s based largely on interviews which the director conducted in 1988 with Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann (her boyfriend before Sutcliffe and, as I learned from the closing legends here, the designer of the ‘Revolver’ album cover and subsequently a member of the Plastic Ono Band).
Stuart Sutcliffe is the pivotal character in Backbeat and this works both for and against the film. Watching it clarified in my mind a fundamental weakness of Nowhere Boy: it’s difficult to believe that the teenager played by Aaron Johnson grew up into John Lennon. If the person playing someone as famous as Lennon doesn’t evoke the real thing he needs to create something magnetically different and Johnson, although he seems a competent actor, fails to do that. There are no such problems with Lennon here: that may be partly because he’s essentially a supporting character but it’s also because Ian Hart has a real feel for, and gets across, what you believe to be important qualities of John Lennon – his wit and aggression, and how he uses words (most of the time) to express that aggression. Hart is good too at acting Lennon singing. (The Beatles’ voices are supplied by a collection of American rock band singers.) An actor playing Stuart Sutcliffe doesn’t have to deal with the audience’s expectations in the same way: Sutcliffe is a shadowy, ill-fated figure whom we know only from Astrid Kirchherr’s photographs. Stephen Dorff, who plays him, reflects rather too well our idea of Sutcliffe: Dorff is a rather vapid, amorphous presence. You could argue that this confirms the sense of mystery that surrounds Sutcliffe and Dorff’s wan glamour does help to make him a credibly obscure object of Lennon’s and Astrid’s desire. It’s a limitation, though, in scenes in which Sutcliffe needs to be the motive force. As Astrid, Sheryl Lee has a very arresting look (she was Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks) and her face seems perfect for the cropped hairdo. Like Dorff, she’s more pictorial than dynamic but that does at least increase the impact of her emotional breakdown when Sutcliffe dies, of a brain haemorrhage. Jennifer Ehle’s performance as Lennon’s future wife Cynthia Powell – already apprehensive about what fame for the Beatles might mean for her life with John – is much better than in later, better-known performances I’ve seen from her.
Backbeat begins in Liverpool: Lennon and Sutcliffe are in a bar, where a girl singer is performing indifferently (Marcelle Duprey does the bad singing very well). They get into a fight with her boyfriend and his sidekicks. Sutcliffe is badly beaten; as he falls to the ground, he hits his head against a wall and we’re meant to think this caused the injury which eventually kills him. (Wikipedia says that Sutcliffe sustained a skull fracture in the fight and that this wasn’t treated at the time.) The screenplay sets up the main themes of the story efficiently. Lennon and Sutcliffe met at art college in Liverpool and the competing imperatives of painting and rock ‘n’ roll are clearly laid out. (Sutcliffe left the Beatles to concentrate on his art: I hadn’t realised that his work had been so successfully exhibited after his death.) The alleged extent to which Astrid Kirchherr influenced the Beatles’ look when they first became stars and the progress of their career in Hamburg are conveyed neatly and believably. (They start off as little more than a backing group for strippers at the Kaiserkeller; their residency is interrupted when they’re deported to England because George Harrison is underage and resumed after his eighteenth birthday.) The unresolved nature of the love between Lennon and Sutcliffe, however, is pushed too hard into the dramatic centre of the story. Lennon’s angry paranoid anxiety that people think he’s queer is one thing but some of the embraces between the two boys, and a couple of remarks that Lennon makes, are too emphatically ambiguous. There’s also a clumsy, florid scene, when Sutcliffe comes back to the apartment he shares with Astrid to find her and Klaus (Kai Wiesinger) watching news of the erection of the Berlin Wall. Sutcliffe gets the wrong idea, beats up Klaus and trashes the place and Astrid’s photographs. By contrast, an exchange between Astrid and Lennon, in which she asks him what he’ll say about her when he’s famous, is well written and very well played by Sheryl Lee and Ian Hart.
Backbeat is nothing special and it’s a missed opportunity in terms of a description of life within the Beatles during their time in Hamburg – the characters of Paul (Gary Bakewell), George (Chris O’Neill) and Pete Best (Scot Williams), and their relationships with Lennon and Sutcliffe, are very sketchy. But I preferred the film to Nowhere Boy: at its best – in the opening sequence in the Liverpool pub and Ian Wilson’s atmospheric photography indoors and outdoors in Hamburg – it has a gloomy friction that’s hard to shake off. It brings to life a Beatles prehistory and the various levels of personal tragedy experienced by Stuart Sutcliffe, Astrid Kirchherr, John Lennon and Pete Best. The film creates a sense of darkness, from which the Beatles broke into elating light as 1962 became 1963.
31 December 2009
