Paul Thomas Anderson’s interest in invigorating on-screen music dates back to the late 1990s when, after “Boogie Nights,” he made mini-Technicolor masterpieces with his ex-girlfriend Fiona Apple — or created a San Fernando Valley-sized shrine to Aimee Mann with her third feature, “Magnolia.” Since then, he’s worked with HAIM while turning one-third of his Los Angelino triumvirate, Alana Haim, into a movie actress. He toured for Radiohead and collaborated regularly with band member Jonny Greenwood to create some of the most memorable music of the 21st century. Many young moviegoers now associate the mischievously melodious notes of “Phantom Thread” with the poisonous promise of new love and obsessive creation.
Last December, PTA teamed up with Geese frontman Cameron Winter to film, while using his own Panavision camera, his solo onstage performance at Carnegie Hall, running through sparse piano arrangements of tracks from his solo album, “Heavy Metal.” The result, a 72-minute film now distributed as a roadshow by Janus Films before inevitably living on the Criterion Collection, is a stunning arrangement in itself: a deeply painful concert film, sincere but never cloying and earnest, tender to the point of fragility. (Benny Safdie is a co-producer, and the film’s quality and New York setting can’t help but leave its mark.)
Winter, lithe and with matted hair, can seem a little uncomfortable in his skin in the public eye, as he did onstage before “Cameron Winter at Carnegie” in its world premiere at the New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall. But on the piano, laser-beamed in his songs, he is gently electrified, seemingly at peace as his tenor vocal glissando and nimble piano fingers produce folk ballads of shivering tenderness that echo Harry Nilsson and Van Morrison. (The usual comparisons to Tom Waits and Rufus Wainright are also correct, but Winter is its own weird thing.) If you weren’t previously convinced by Geese’s sly antic rock chaos – quickly becoming one of the most popular contemporary art rock bands of this era – you’re about to be. Paul Thomas Anderson created a rhapsodic shrine for the man, yet ballad-sized in its emotional scale.
Winter, in December, played and sang before a packed house of more than 2,700 people in the majestic cultural temple that is Carnegie Hall, and this film can at times feel like a religious experience, an incantation, a solitary vigil. The singer-songwriter was 23 at the time of the performance, a year older than Bob Dylan when he headlined Carnegie Hall, and similarly, he was on the brink of fame. Attached to a moving platform that sometimes crosses the stage when not holding Winter, Anderson’s camera captures the expressionism and chiaroscuro of the stage lights illuminating and fading across the singer’s face.
The result is hypnotic, a concert film as good as “Stop Making Sense” but for introverts. Songs like the popular single “$0” take on an even darker, heartbreaking quality when a romantic protagonist complains about being taken advantage of by a relationship (“You make me feel like a dollar in your hand/You make me feel like I’m a zero dollar man”). Stripped of any production, his indie hit “Love Takes Miles” plays even better. While many of the songs sort of hover in the same key and blend into one another, it makes for an all the more captivating experience. The lack of interstitials, save for a gentle prologue and a moving coda, also creates an experience that is immersive, deep, and the kind that you can feel the truth of somewhere in your body even if you can’t quite articulate it.
Grade: A-
“Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall premiered at the New York Film Festival. Janus Films will release it in theaters beginning November 20.
Gn entert
