CAPSULE: One More Time With Feeling (2016, Dir. Andrew Dominik)

There is not going to be a perceptible difference between reviews of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' new album 'Skeleton Trees' and Andrew Dominik's accompanying 2D/3D studio/interview film One More Time With Feeling. Both have been clawed from the structure-fracturing stranglehold of grief. Both rumble and crash with haphazard intensity. Both attempt to make sense of the world from a position of deconstructed personhood.

Cave himself calls this out early on in the film - it was as if the trauma wiped him of any understanding of himself, or who he was. What he'd do in any given situation was suddenly a mystery to him. Agreeing to have himself filmed in such a state, for instance.

Dominik's amorphous black and white portrait film is sensitive to these surroundings and these circumstances. Like Cave and those trapped (by choice) in his immediate presence, like the music they are wringing out together, One More Time With Feeling cares little for shape. It cares little for anything in solid form. Instead, it rumbles. It warps itself around the fatalistic optimism of 'Skeleton Trees's eulogising and it communicates its ramshackle pain.

As far as working through the grief goes, Dominik's portrait of Cave, his wife Susie and his son Earl, is brutal in its life-goes-on honesty. He documents what has changed and what can't change. What remains the same and what will never be the same again. What is left he leaves to the music.

It is, suffice to say, painful.

★★★★

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