What comes through are highs and valleys seen from the inside, a clarifying memoir from an unsentimental woman who endured being called every shaming name, with powerful grace notes of understanding from a son whose eyes betray a tough childhood.
80
Time OutPhil de Semlyen
Time OutPhil de Semlyen
If co-directors Svetlana Zill and Alexis Bloom paint a sometimes confronting picture of the price of ‘free love’, that never tarnishes their subject. You’re left with the sense that she was a butterfly neither the Stones nor any of the other men in her life could ever trap – a fitting epitaph to a mercurial life.
“Catching Fire” makes an intriguing portrait because its first half establishes the Pallenberg in the public perception, and in her mind’s eye — a free spirit with a great eye for fashion.
Catching Fire is more concerned with the mercurial essence of its subject than it is with the nuts and bolts of her life. We learn little, for example, about her family background.
Pallenberg is finally in focus. But the picture is tough to look at.
38
RogerEbert.comMarya E. Gates
RogerEbert.comMarya E. Gates
Despite claiming otherwise in its marketing, this doc still wants to uphold her as the rock n’ roll goddess of the headlines rather than as a person on her own terms.