SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL Movie Review

One Plus One

Jean-Luc Godard's legendary experiment tells two simultaneous stories; one is of the death of a young revolutionary, while the other is of the creation of a song by the Rolling Stones. One works, the other doesn't. Yet the sequences chronicling the Stones’ assembly of “Sympathy for the Devil,” lick by lick and track by track, while the camera glides gracefully through their recording studio in a kind of visual counterpoint to the music, are exciting enough to make you wish Godard had made the song's creation his only subject. The film was originally to be called One Plus One, and the metaphor for revolution that the director was looking to capture depended on the Stones coming right up to the brink of giving birth to their creation, but never actually completing it. Hence, Godard's One Plus One never features the complete, “final” version of the song “Sympathy for the Devil.” One of the film's producers, however, thought that he had a better chance of recouping his costs from what looked to him like a disaster by running the finished song over the film's end credits, and by changing the movie's title to that of the song. Godard politely disagreed with the decision, allegedly jumping the producer as the reworked version of the film unspooled at the London Film Festival.

NEXT STOP … Wind from the East, Gimme Shelter, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus

1970 110m/C FR Mick Jagger, Rolling Stones; D: Jean-Luc Godard. VHS FOX, OM