6.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
BESSIE focuses on the transformation of a struggling young singer into the "Empress of the Blues," one of the most successful and influential recording artists of the 1920s. Capturing Bessie Smith's professional and personal highs and lows, the film paints a portrait of a tenacious spirit who, despite her demons, became a legend.
Starring: Queen Latifah, Michael Kenneth Williams, Khandi Alexander, Tika Sumpter, Tory KittlesMusic | 100% |
Biography | 54% |
Drama | Insignificant |
History | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: DTS 5.1
Spanish: DTS 2.0
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
HBO's bio-pic of blues legend Bessie Smith took twenty years to make, but Queen Latifah was always the producers' first choice for the title role, even as the script was rewritten and directors came and went. As proof, the short feature on the making of the film includes excerpts from Latifah's blurry VHS audition in 1996, where it was already clear that then-26-year-old singer had the screen presence to play the dynamic performer dubbed "The Empress of the Blues". What the star picked up in the intervening decades, as she says herself in interviews, was the life experience to fill out the entirety of Smith's character. By the time Bessie began filming, Latifah had already lived longer than Smith, who died in a car accident at the age of 43. The original script for Bessie was principally written by Horton Foote, one of America's great playwrights and the two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter of To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies. The influence of Foote, who died in 2009 but retains a story credit on the finished film, can still be seen in its laser-sharp focus on the effect of money on relationships and the sense of how family history accompanies a person throughout life. The final script is credited to Bettina Gilois (McFarland, USA) and director Dee Rees (Pariah), whose strong vision for the film so impressed the producers that they gave her the assignment despite her short résumé. Rees proceeded to break with the conventional show business bio-pic, in which the artist's first-act struggles to achieve success are followed, in the second act, by a personal crisis caused by inner demons and expressed through drugs, alcohol, infidelity, psychological problems, broken relationships and/or whatever else can be drawn from the subject's life. Depending on the facts, the third act is either a final decline or a renewal and second chance. Bessie takes a different approach. The struggle to succeed and the inner demons go hand-in-hand; indeed, one of the underlying themes throughout Bessie is that inner demons are part of the essential equipment for establishing the connection with an audience that elevates a blues singer to the first rank. Hopping smoothly among locations as Smith travels the vaudeville circuit, and slipping almost imperceptibly between an objective third-party view of events and Smith's intensely emotional subjective view—a technique borrowed from Olivier Dahan's portrait of Édith Piaf in La Vie en Rose—Rees and Latifah present a nuanced portrait of a complex and contradictory woman: vulnerable and strong-willed, approachable and remote, needy and giving, generous and withholding. Everything about Bessie Smith was extreme, including her talent.
Bessie was shot with the Arri Alexa by Jeff Jur, whose credits range from Dirty Dancing to the last two seasons of Showtime's Dexter. In the featurette included in the extras, Jur says that Rees constantly pushed him in new directions. Although he doesn't give specifics, it is certainly the case that Bessie doesn't look anything like the typical historical film, where desaturated colors and a golden glow are often used to convey the sense of a bygone era. Instead, the cinematography is bold and bright, the better to place the viewer in Bessie's era as it was: vital, vibrant and exciting. Much of Bessie Smith's success overlapped the Roaring Twenties, an era of prosperity and high living, despite (or because of) Prohibition. In production design, costumes, makeup and cinematography, Bessie attempts to convey the excitement of its time, especially from its title character's point of view. HBO's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced by a direct digital path from the digital intermediate on which post-production was completed (including digital effects to remove any vestige of modernity from locations). The image is superb, with solid blacks, excellent detail and no noise or interference. Colors range from naturalistic (e.g., the scenes of bread lines during the Depression) to the bold and intense hues of the nightclubs and stages where Bessie performs. The notable exception is the flashback cuts to Bessie's childhood, which are deliberately desaturated and slightly blurred, to create a sharp contrast with the present-day sequences. HBO has mastered Bessie with an average bitrate of 30.99 Mbps, which is excellent for digitally originated material, and the compression has been capably performed.
Bessie's 5.1 audio mix, presented in resounding, lossless DTS-HD MA, is a revealing experience. As explained by music supervisor Evyen Klean, one of the soundtrack's goals was to recreate Bessie Smith's music as if the viewer were able to hear it "back in the day" instead of on a limited selection of scratchy vintage recordings. To that end, the instruments have been recorded with a care and a dynamic range that lets the bass notes and drumbeats vibrate through you as if you were sitting in a tiny club or an outdoors revival tent, with the musicians performing nearby and the singer projecting at the audience (a technique explained to Bessie by Mo'Nique's Ma Rainey in an early scene). The dramatic scenes are equally clear, in the manner we have come to expect from contemporary 5.1 mixes. Rachel Portman has supplied period-appropriate underscoring that blends smoothly with the blues and jazz standards being recreated by the talented musicians playing throughout the film, as well as the occasional original recording, such as Louis Armstrong performing "Black and Blue".
Neither a "message" film nor a conventional show business biography, Bessie is a fascinating portrait of an American original, a musician whose influence has been so thoroughly absorbed into popular culture that its extent can no longer be calculated. Historians can debate the details, but the portrayal is so compelling that it should bring Bessie Smith to the attention of a whole new generation, just as Lady Sings the Blues did for Billie Holliday. Highly recommended.
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