Directors: Alexis Bloom, Svetlana Zill

The pitch black side of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll is uncovered in this handsomely assembled documentary portrait of actor, model and muse Anita Pallenberg, narrated by Scarlett Johansson from Pallenberg’s unpublished memoirs. Raised in Germany and Italy, Pallenberg went to New York in 1963 where she became a scenester of sorts and wound up ‘washing Jasper Johns’ paint brushes’. She dabbled in modelling but did not take to it. Pallenberg met the Stones in 1965 at a concert in Munich and had a brief affair with Brian Jones. Later she began her notorious relationship with Keith Richards. A burgeoning acting career, which saw her appear in Roger Vadim’s ‘Barbarella’ and ‘Performance’, was put on hold at Richards’ insistence and the couple had three children, Marlon, Angela and Tara, the latter, a boy who died at two months’ old. Contemporary interviews with Marlon and Angela find them surprisingly understanding about their wildly unconventional and chaotic upbringings. Pallenberg and Richards descended into outright addiction in Nellcôte a rented villa in France during the recording of the Stones ragged classic ‘Exile on Main Street’. From then on events became ever more harrowing. Despite the frankness of Pallenberg’s memoirs, the documentary does not quite work as an act of feminist reclamation, rather a bleak cautionary tale. It does, however, contain a wealth of fab archive footage of Pallenberg and Richards in their peacock-strutting, globe-spanning glory days.

David Willoughby

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