Post by mayafan on Jan 23, 2018 21:24:39 GMT
During its many years of gestation, the only thing known about Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. was that it was a beyond-troubled production. In 2012, director Steve Loveridge wrote that he’d “rather die” than finish the profile of the musician/his friend since college; as of last March, M.I.A.’s official position was that she hadn’t spoken to Loveridge — a friend of hers since art school — “in years” and had no idea what, if anything, was happening with the film. Whatever was going on in the background of those statements, a finished film has emerged, both director and subject were there for its premiere, and the finished product is, at the very least, coherent.
Drawn mostly from footage shot by Maya Arulpragasam, family and friends, Matangi is roughly divisible into three parts. The first third is about her inevitably complicated upbringing after arriving in London at age 11; her father — the founder of the Tamil Tiger resistance — arrived almost a decade later. In film diary footage, Arulpragasam’s brother and sister are less than thrilled by his arrival after years of radio silence, while Arulpragasam insists the overall experience was a blessing: he gave the siblings an interesting background and made them strong. Between college terms, Arulpragasam returned to Sri Lanka for two months, which helped articulate the immigrant experience as the core of her artistic practices. Flashbacks to this consciousness-raising trip — in May, June and July of 2010, one month at a time — break up all three parts; the second is a rather hazy account of her rise to fame, which is light on recording and business specifics. The third addresses various controversies, real or fake, that have attended her. The spectrum of seriousness ranges from ostensible support for terrorism in Sri Lanka (I’m not even going to touch that) to her flipping the finger at the Super Bowl while supporting Madonna (which, in an adult world, would not be an issue). This last stretch is basically dedicated to rehashing a series of instances in which M.I.A. feels she’s been publicly misrepresented (including that infamous Lynn Hirschberg profile). I’m not even saying she’s wrong, but this is the kind of obsessive worrying about image shaping — first a recap of the event, then the refutation — that makes for a truly fans-only affair.
I do not have strong feelings about M.I.A. either way, but I had a good time watching the opening stretch, with its period-redolent camcorder captures of council estates and bonus footage of Elastica’s Justine Frischmann (often in her Sunkist t-shirt) hanging out with and/or squabbling with M.I.A. In footage shot during college, M.I.A. is clearly a total package of a star performer: she can dance, mug for the camera, make her own beats and curate her own eyecatching fashions. I would have loved to learn more about how, precisely, she managed her ascent or, indeed, gotten a more concrete sense of the particulars of making her music, but this isn’t a studio rat deep-dive, let alone something along the film-whatever-you-like lines of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Fans, adjust upwards accordingly based on my biases.
filmmakermagazine.com/104562-sundance-2018-critics-notebook-day-5-matangi-maya-m-i-a-skate-kitchen/