I don't tell you this to moan, but I thought you should know in the interests of full disclosure. The joy of finally seeing Pulp in concert, albeit on a cinema screen, has definitely coloured my reaction to Florian Habicht's pop-doc curiosity, Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets.
I loved it.
Yes, it is a shame that my first experience of Pulp live (outside of YouTube) is inside a cinema but Habicht's film burrows so deep into the pockets of Jarvis Cocker and his home town, Sheffield, that I have absolutely no complaints. In fact, if there is one thing that can be said for viewing a concert film in said circumstances, it is that there are fewer smartphones in your field of vision. Fewer, not none. I guess there are also fewer dickhead punters, also. Again, fewer, not none. We had one at our screening. To his credit, he was pretty well behaved until he started haranguing the presenter of the post-film Q+A into some impromptu karaoke. Until then, his mid-film whooping kind of added to the experience.
As you'd expect any Jarvis-centric film to be, Habicht's documentary is not your regular, run of the mill concert video. In fact there is relatively little concert footage in the documentary. Usually, this would be a bugbear of mine. It frustrates me no end when I'm there to be consumed alive by the music and the director keeps cutting away from the performance. But here, as the film's tagline intimates, Habicht is going for a whole lot more. He seeks to unpack Pulp's lo-fi-tea-drinking-disco-retro phenomenon, not through their music but through the impact they've had on the common people they've spent the past three decades wryly celebrating.
Curb-side, it seems like everyone's a fan, and if they're not, they're a family friend or some such. The city is alive with Pulp. There are Pulp dance groups, Pulp football clubs and Pulp choirs. There are readings salons of Jarvis' lyrics, there are academic seminars on the band's representation of class and there is an abundance of street wisdom centred on the band's origins. There's a young man who swears Pulp saved his life, there's a nurse who flew all the way from America for the concert, there's a young butcher who's not sure if Jarvis still works at the markets (he was a fish man), and there's a paper seller who'll spin a yarn of any colour. It's a simple but effective evocation of Pulp through the people who gave them their rich source material.
It's apt that a concert film about a band who constantly churned out song-sized stories is stocked full of stories of its own. There is even a corker about how it all got off the ground. In London, readying to premiere his previous film, Love Story, Habicht didn't know anyone to invite. He thought to himself, I like Jarvis Cocker, and on that whim he invited the lanky, bespectacled Sheffielder to the party. He came, they drank tea, they hit on an idea for this film and almost immediately the band gave the go ahead. There was only one catch, they wanted Habicht to film Pulp's final concert. The concert was in six weeks time.
Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets doesn't show too many marks of its speedy gestation. If anything, it feeds off the spontaneity that the timeframe thrust upon the production. Essence is key. On Sheffield's streets Habicht thrives. As the concert approaches he gives a beautiful sense of immediacy to the event. It is as if the whole of the industrial city is preparing itself for the grand finale. And what a finale it is.
Jarvis is, and always has been, a gawkily mesmerising stage presence, all flapping arms and jutting hips. In his two-inch boots he stands astride the speakers, limbs at all angles pointing seductively to the rapturous crowd. Like any great concert, the band saves their best for last and Habicht is on-hand to capture it in all its glory. After being tantalised with word of the strength of Cocker's performance from just about every person in Sheffield, we finally get to experience the wonder. Jarvis thrusts his way through the entire six and a half minutes of Pulp's magnum opus, 'This is Hardcore'. I died. I've been to concerts where the one song I've wanted to hear doesn't make it onto the setlist, and here, where almost no songs make the cut unedited, there is the one song I would forego all others to hear live. And Jarvis absolutely kills it.
He's done his city proud.
★★★★☆
Trailer:
Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets screened at Sydney Film Festival 2014.
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