Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami opens with a big wow of performance. She’s got a voice with authority, and her pronunciation sounds biblical-dramatic in a song called Jones the Rhythm. Against a black background there’s just Jones’s face and head in a gold skull mask, and only after a minute or so does the film pull back to show Jones in full body, in a black leotard. She undulates with a golden hula hoop, and a dark blue cape unfurls behind her. It’s a hell of an entrance to the movie about her.
The cliché about Jones describes her androgynous look, but that doesn’t get it. She’s tall with long legs, and an angular head and face. She’s 70 years old tomorrow but looks not ageless or well-preserved or anything like that. She looks as if age has nothing to do with her – a kind of human artificiality plus a mythic permanence. In performance, her masks and hats suggest that she’s too big for the category “human.”
But director/editor Sophie Fiennes has made a tricky film. Just as you settle into a sense of the fabulous presence of Grace Jones, the film drops into scenes of her life offstage. Jones was born in Jamaica, but she grew up in Syracuse, New York. The movie shows her on visits to family, and old friends and neighbors in Jamaica. Some of these encounters look contrived – conversations that sound as if the filmmakers gave Jones and others the topics for not spontaneous talk. But Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami is not conventional documentary. It doesn’t try to tell the story of this singer and actress in any typical documentary sense. It’s a portrait, so it’s also artificial and interpretive. The scenes from her private life are as if painted by an artist literally shedding light on Jones’s character. The fundamental tension of the film sets the formalities of art and performance against the different artificialities of what we consider normal life.
There’s no reason to believe that Jones just shows up at the old Jamaican woman’s rudimentary home. Of course, it was planned, but to see and hear Jones shift into the English of poor Jamaicans shows her fluidity with language and her capacities with people. These offstage scenes also can be grating, trivial and sometimes straight out whiney. She wrangles over the phone about hotel rooms and details of shows. At the dinner table, there’s the same kind of gossipy complaining that you might hear at anybody’s private family events.
The name Jones comes from her mother; her father was Williams, and after the family talk about names – what traits come with Jones and what with Williams – suddenly Grace Jones is onstage singing about the names. It’s a stunning demonstration of how a great artist transforms the unexciting moments and details of daily life. In song, the names echo and resound – they take on life and metaphor.
Grace Jones is an unruly movie. It shifts gears and jumps the tracks. You wonder why some scenes run so long, or why they’re even in the picture. But the movie never seems out of control or unaware of what it’s doing. In a church sequence, an older woman sings a hymn in a voice so screechy dreadful it reminds you of the infamous bad singer Florence Foster Jenkins. But no one in the congregation, including Grace Jones, shows judgment. There seems no reason for the moment, but at the same time it fits – it’s part of the world of Grace Jones.
While the scene may puzzle the audience, that’s not an argument against it. Beware the clichés about Grace Jones. People try to contain her, to label and domesticate her lurid, prodigious talent and presence, to render her harmless. This movie, Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami sets out to undo those constraints. It’s at once thrilling, annoying, fascinating, and just like Grace Jones herself, it refuses to know its place.
