MIFF Session 2: POLY STYRENE - I AM A CLICHE

Mixed race and facing down the late '70s British ultra right Marion Elliot changed her name to Poly Styrene and formed a band called X Ray Spex whose blasting style barged into the London punk scene. They recorded one of the seminal albums of the movement and collapsed shortly after when Poly left. That is part of the story of this film. The other part is her daughter's quest to connect with her deceased mother. This part is the point of the film but it can't be told without the first.

Celeste Bell, Marion/Poly's daughter and co-director of this film, did know her mother while she lived and had made the beginnings of peace after years of alt.religion and bipolar disorder which saw Celeste willingly taken from her mother's care. The film timeline cinematically recreates the process of discovery that Celeste went through as she encountered the pieces of evidence her mother left behind. Punk rock left a lot of casualties. Not having the support of the mainstream industry whose destruction it sought, many of these were sentenced to cultural obscurity. Celeste finds that her mother was one of its heroes, one of the few to bear a genuine socio-political motivation and successfully so, but one whose fragile mental state could not cope with such pressures and prizes that her career brought.

So after we are treated to a rich and well composed, thrilling biography of that career the film holds its breath and proceeds to the harder part. Celeste is frank about the effects of her upbringing on her own mental state and the sense of healing or at least treatment the emerges from her telling this story is poignant and (more than once) chilling. The film takes the risk that this longer part might lose its audience but I wonder about that. It's certainly slower and more meditative but it's also deeper. Poly Styrene followed a brief explosive career with what to her fans felt like obscurity. I was a fan in the late '70s and I knew almost nothing of what had become of her. This is an opportunity to fill in that larger volume of her biography that has been so ill served.

While a few of the friends, family and colleagues are shown on screen they are mostly heard in voiceover and the string of them makes for easy absorption as the story progresses. U.K. film star Ruth Negga reads Poly's diary and interview excerpts as a role. I wondered about this at first but then, given Negga's performance and the performative nature of interview (especially rock music interviews) and diary writing it becomes a welcome feature, standing in for what we won't be able to hear otherwise. I was amused to see a few cuts from Molly Meldrum's lengthy interview with her from '78 or '79. Meldrum reliably won RAM's klutz of the year award and his interviews were often chaotic and anti-informative through no fault of their own. I have seen this full interview on Youtube and might again as the bits of it on screen reveal that the two seemed to be having a natural sounding conversation and some real thinking is coming out of it. (For contrast in the extreme, Youtube Meldrum's attempted interview with Prince Charles for some perpective.)

I do recall the Molly interview but more than that the British tv documentary about the legacy of the hippies in which Caroline Coon talked of the punks as being the hippies' revenge. The docco featured the now well known footage of X Ray Spex in a practice playing the gleefully ironic song that gives this film it extended title. Also there was a swell of representation in the NME and other organs of the time. And it struck me that everything Johnny Rotten (poignantly absent from this film) said about the spirit of punk being self expression despite all was far more potently expressed by Poly. Her general's peaked cap or solider's helmet were as comic book as they were anti-militarism. She didn't take the hair glue, garbage bag skirts, or nasal safety pins. But her unignorable dental braces were real and served as gleeful reminders that she was who she was. And when she sang Oh Bondage Up Yours she was having a laugh as well as being gravely serious. I might be old but the solid fury of that song has not been softened by the deacdes and can still slap you across the face. Same with the poignancy of Germ Free Adolescents with its surprisingly gentle arrangement contrasting with the power of the vocal. 

There's a photo set from the time featuring Poly Styrene, Siouxsie Sioux, Debbie Harry, Pauline Black (who does appear in voiceover), Viv Albertine and Chrissie Hynde. There are a few goes at it and the women are doing what young people do when having their photo taken in a group, going from smiles to contorted mugging (never with them all doing anything like the same thing) to the light weariness that sets in after a few have been taken. It's a reminder of the youth of these pioneers but also how durable the legacy of women in the punk years. Poly Styrene's place is set for as long as anyone can remember.

This film begins with Celeste Bell gazing at a wall of tvs playing an old video of her mother's band. Bell seems numbed by the sight. The video has been distressed to one step short of outright pixelation, only the vague madly coloured shape of the woman in the military cap tells us who it is. If we didn't know that this film is here to tell us and we will learn more than we might want but we'll also pick up a thing or two about fame and stress in the darker margins of the industry. Celeste makes her peace but it is left open. I appreciated how in the final act of reconcilation shown on screen there remains a sense of overhang, that some wounds can never quite heal, some deeds will always haunt, some ghosts will always roam.