Express at Berlinale: ‘Joan Baez I Am A Noise’ looks back on the high highs and the monumental lows of the singer’s life

The film, made by friends and close collaborators Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle and Karen O’Connor, cuts back and forth between archival footage, and the singer looking back upon the high highs and the monumental lows of her life: years of therapy having helped in the long process of healing. For the first time, she speaks of abuse at the hands of her very handsome father (her sister recalls an incident which could easily be classified as molestation), which her ‘lovely’ mother seemed unaware of; Baez herself has a hazy memory of something disturbing involving her father. How do these incidents shape us, as we grow? These are questions raised sensitively in the film: we also see a softening, with Baez wondering why they, as a family, didn’t take as much care of the father as they did with the mother, in their old age.

Baez and Dylan, whom she helped bring into the mainstream, were poster-children of an age when the impact of counter-culture was soaring: some of the loveliest parts of the film have them sharing the frame–in one, she does a very funny Dylan-singing-Baez take-off. She also speaks of how Dylan ‘broke my heart’, and how, with fame, he became distant, not just from her, but from everyone. He was no longer a person, she says, ‘bye, bye, Bobby’.

After the screening, Baez showed up for a Q&A: it is the first time, we were told, that she has travelled to a film festival. And then she sang a few lines, and that was just sublime– that voice-with-that-distinctive-grain, which she is seen honing with a voice coach in the film, filled the theatre. And it was all diamonds and rust, once again.

The other extremely satisfying film I caught earlier in the morning, Zhang Lu’s drama The Shadowless Tower, doesn’t feel like one. It is almost like slices of lives unspooling in such a marvellously artless way that you almost don’t notice the art that’s gone into its making.

It is playing the competition section of the 73rd Berlinale, part of a solid Chinese slate at the festival, possibly the largest selection of films from that country till now.

It is about a Beijing-based food critic who, in his impending middle years, is still adrift. The 144 minutes film also deals with such themes as genteel poverty, urban loneliness, impending death, without feeling the least bit heavy.

The film roams about, observing precocious little girls, former wives, current relationships which may go somewhere or not, estranged fathers in the grip of dementia. These are people not together in the conventional sense, but they remain connected: the marks that people leave on each other are the glue that cannot be washed away.

What happens when humans do not cast shadows? It is a question you are left with, in this gently humorous, thoughtful excavation of life.