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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite tales on this weekly publication.
Given Bob Dylan’s difficult relationship together with his followers, it’s hardly stunning that the most effective gig of his late profession was carried out for a faux viewers in a venue that doesn’t exist. It was, nonetheless, carried out in entrance of director Alma Har’el’s digital camera. The result’s Shadow Kingdom: a surprising live performance film a couple of present that by no means actually occurred.
The 50-minute movie — now coming to BBC, having been launched with little warning on a distinct segment streaming web site in 2021 — is a component stay recording, half elaborately staged fiction. The 13 songs performed by Dylan and his band are actual and carried out with renewed zeal and novel instrumentations. However the Bon Bon Membership, the old-timey Marseille bar the place this most intimate present supposedly unfolds, is the truth is a soundstage in Santa Monica. The brooding males and soignée ladies who smoke, drink and dance to the night’s leisure are actors dressed as characters you may discover in a Thirties noir. What we see is a fantasy world: a shadow kingdom shot in luscious monochrome.
The movie is an unabashedly nostalgic, elegiac tribute to the previous. Whereas the aesthetic is redolent of a Prohibition-era dive bar, the cramped, smoky setting may also be seen as a type of homecoming to Greenwich Village’s Gaslight Cafe the place Dylan first broke by means of. Fittingly, the note-perfect set is dominated by early profession tracks which might be alternately raucous and plaintive, ironic and mawkish, beloved and unknown.
Right here, songs composed by a younger man appear to be reinvented in entrance of our eyes by the 80-year-old now singing them. Melodies are modified, however so too are meanings. In “Perpetually Younger” the lung-busting crescendo turns into a gravelly whisper, as a music written for an toddler son turns right into a lament for his ageing self. The haunting “What Was It You Needed” (an Eighties outlier right here) now sounds much less like a reproach than a rueful reflection. An nearly recitational rendition of “It’s All Over Now Child Blue” shifts its fatalism from a relationship to life itself.
At occasions Har’el bathes Dylan in a tender, nearly divine mild. At others she brings out an earthy, mischievous facet. For his lusty rocker “I’ll Be Your Child Tonight”, as an example, he’s flanked between two ladies throwing suggestive glances on the digital camera. His microphone-straddling energy stance looks like a small however important present of tolerating virility.
Behind him are a band which might be at all times heard however solely partially seen. Har’el doubles down on the anonymity imposed by Covid-era masks by turning them into spectral, uncanny figures whose devices, disembodied fingers or seemingly headless torsos emerge from pockets of impenetrable mild or shrouding darkness. The impact is splendidly eerie and dreamlike however the message is evident: there are various gamers, however just one Bard.
★★★★★
On BBC2 on December 2 at 10pm
