Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg

Curzon Mayfair 17th May

Review written for Record Collector magazine

Special screening with Q&A featuring directors Alexis Bloom and Sverlana Zillwas plus Anita’s son Marlon Richards and her daughter Angela (formerly Dandelion), chaired by an extremely well-informed Miranda Sawyer. 

Celebs present: Noel Gallagher, Bob Geldorf, Pam Hogg, Matt Lee

Instead of the traditional rock-doc format of talking heads pontificating about “the Anita they knew” we got lots of previously-unseen home movies and a running commentary using Anita’s own words, taken from an unpublished autobiography and read by Scarlett  Johansson. There is fascinating footage from the ill-fated 1967 road trip to Morocco taken by Anita, Keith Richards, Brian Jones  and (an uncredited) Tom Keylock. The 1969 boat trip to Brazil by Pallenberg, Richards, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful also features. Most startling is the footage of Richards in 1976, playing live in Paris immediately after hearing that Tara, his third child with Anita, had died of a cot death. Richard insisted that the concert not be cancelled although Nick Kent described the couple after the show as “no longer the Scott and Zelda of the  rock’n’roll era they looked like some tragic shell-shocked couple leading each other out of a concentration camp.”

Many Stones fans regard the 1971 sessions in Nellcote, a villa in the South of France rented by newly tax-exiled Richards, as the setting for some of the finest music the band would ever make, subsequently released as Exile On Main Street. Catching Fire uses film, photography and eye-witness interviews to reframe Nellcote through Pallenberg’s eyes. There may have been a makeshift recording studio in the basement, but Nellcote was also a home where Richards, Pallenberg and three-year old Marlon were living. The practicalities of trying to run what was essentially a hotel with an ever-changing population of twenty plus rock’n’roll degenerates and the associated sex, drugs and rock’n’roll fell mainly to Anita, the only woman consistently present who was also the only French speaker. 

This traditional approach towards male and female roles was echoed by Richards’ shutting down of Anita’s acting career. Here the film errs on the generous – Anita is brilliant in Performance and good in Barbarella, both times when she was effectively playing herself, but her starring role in A Degree Of Murder is wooden and unconvincing. It is claimed Richards paid her to stop acting and stay at home whilst he went on tour, fuelling her drug habit. It got worse when they moved to upstate New York where Pallenburg is portrayed as a virtual prisoner with no money of her own and her passport held by the Stones management.

It was alcohol rather than drugs that caused Anita to hit rock bottom. After several attempts she got herself clean and sober and the second act of her life began. She moved to Chelsea, got a degree in fashion and textiles from St.Martin’s, became a doting grandmother and began to be recognised as a style icon, particularly by Kate Moss who appears here and admits to deliberately recreating some of Anita’s iconic outfits. Of the folks who were around in the ‘60s her drug buddy Prince Stash appears on screen, whilst Keith Richards recorded a long interview which is used sparingly throughout. He calls her “a piece of work” and still sounds enmeshed with her.

What comes through most clearly is the intense love shared by Anita and Keith, and how drugs poisoned that love. Although towards the end of the film Pallenburg claims that “I regret nothing”, Marlon now admits this was bravado. During the Q&A both he and Angela were clear that Anita and Keith have said that they were sorry for what they put their young family through.

Anita Pallenberg would be a key figure in 20^th century culture if all she had done was cause Keith Richards to write Gimme Shelter. That she was much more than an artist’s muse is made clear by this fascinating film.