Andrew Dominik's Nick Cave Doc 'One More Time With Feeling' Is A Virtuosic Piece Of Filmmaking Art [Venice Review]

If you ever wondered about the color and shape of grief, it is black and white, and three-dimensional: an indescribably beautiful, shatteringly painful object. It is Andrew Dominik‘s Nick Cave documentary “One More Time With Feeling.” The cause of the film’s grief (because it is not just Cave’s, it is his wife’s, his friends’, it is Dominik’s, and it seems to inform every silky move of Benoit Debie and Alwin Kuchler’s superlative, necessary 3D photography) is the death of Cave’s 15 year-old son Arthur, in a fall from a cliff near his Brighton home in July of last year, and everything in the film, even the parts that are not about him and the loss of him, are about him and the loss of him. This is a virtuosic piece of filmmaking art that also happens to be almost unbearably moving. Actually, there is no “almost.”

Cave wrote the songs which appear on the new Bad Seeds album Skeleton Tree before Arthur’s death but recorded them afterward, and Dominik’s film is a document of that recording. In the first half of the film, the death that is its structuring absence is never named, just referred to obliquely with words like “the event” or “the trauma” — seemingly innocuous terms that everyone handles warily, like they’re nail bombs full of potential devastation. The “event,” in Cave’s own words, instantly made him into another person, into “someone else inside my skin.” So the Cave we see singing is not the same Cave who wrote the words in his mouth, and yet the songs are all, every one of them, about dread and loss and love so sharp and yearning it feels like hurt. The uncanny resonances that the lyrics contain — and always contained — can be ascribed to the fact that Cave’s songwriting has always tended toward the doomy, but he suggests, with typically matter-of-fact mysticism, it’s also partly because his songs have elements of prophecy. That thought, of tragedy foretold, might be enough to drive another person mad, but like everything else in the jetstream of an unimaginable horror, the logic of the old you, the way you think you would behave if such-and-such occurred, is simply obliterated. It’s one of the reasons, Cave explains at the start of the film, why he’s moved away from narrative in his songwriting: he just doesn’t believe any more that life happens neatly, one thing then the next, the way it does in stories.

READ MORE: Werner Herzog Goes ‘Into The Inferno’ And Explores The Magic Of Volcanoes [Telluride Review] 

Initially, Dominik’s film seems to be taking a lead from that fragmentary approach with a witty, meta, borderline avant-garde opening in which Cave, Dominik, and Debie all appear bustling around a room talking tech and blocking, and maneuvering around the massive, bulky 3D camera rig they built especially for the shoot. On the soundtrack, Cave voices some wry internal observations while watching himself onscreen. He will do this occasionally throughout, to talk about the “ridiculous” camera, about “Andrew” [Dominik, director and friend], about Suzie (his wife), about “Warren” [Ellis, his closest friend and creative collaborator], about aging and changing. Sometimes he’s critiquing his own performances and sometimes he’s reciting snatches of poetry as though the words just won’t leave him alone if he doesn’t.

But the film does quickly find a rhythm, organizing itself around the playing of the eight (outstanding) tracks that make up the album. The shooting of these sequences is a feat in itself: in a large recording studio, Dominik has set up a circular track around the piano with various inventive but simple light sources providing alternate flares and silhouettes in the chiaroscuro, with the always roving 3D camerawork from DPs Debie and Küchler capturing it all. And even off the track, the camera feels floaty and finessed, gliding around rooms with an intent of its own at times, seeming to pass through doors, swirl down spiral staircases, and during the film’s one color segment, even pushing in through the skin and veins of a singer’s face and out the back of her head to thread through a tiny crack in the wall, out into the night and up, up into the air.

27670-One_More_Time_With_FeelingThe interludes in between the songs are where the interviews happen, though they are so carefully yet casually shot (is this the best handheld 3D we’ve yet seen?) that they don’t feel like artificial inserts and don’t interrupt the flow. And the film’s most audacious formal conceit — to collide old and new together by shooting in 3D but also black and white — is thrilling from the very first shot, which is not of Cave but of Ellis (“Look at him, holding everything together. What would I do without Warren?” Cave wonders). Ellis, with his warm eyes, Rasputin beard and elegant fingers was made to be shot in this wonderful, rich black and white, and the 3D, if it were not already amply justified would probably be so just for a quick shot of his hand falling in and out of shallow focus as he conducts some session violinists. In fact, throughout, it really feels as though the 3D, which is so often used as a gimmick to add a level that is not present in the storytelling, is vital: there is so much to say and so much oceanic feeling to try and encompass, Dominik needs that third dimension, just to be able to cram it all in.

The craft is astonishing — you find yourself holding your breath sometimes — and not just visually but sonically too (take a bow, sound designer Joakim Sundström). The layering of conversation, voiceover, music, tricksy imagery and emotive concept should be cacophonous but becomes choral, as scraps of arcane muso discussion segue into songs, while off-camera a member of the Bad Seeds cracks a joke and Cave breathes one of his tarnished-metal poems in voiceover. It shows how the film exists as a testament to one of the many areas Cave touches on with this album, which was recorded and assembled differently — more quickly, with less revision and reworking — than any of his others: the virtues of spontaneity weighed against the benefits of premeditation, transience versus permanence. “One More Time With Feeling” is dynamic, crackling, inventive in the moment, but it also feels like it will endure forever.

READ MORE: Magnificent ‘Moonlight’ Chronicles The Journey Of A Black, Gay Man In America [Telluride Review]

Throughout it all there is Cave, and the fact of his grief. This is, as he says himself, a different man to the one depicted in Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard‘s lugubrious, playful, hopeful “20,000 Days On Earth.” But it is also the same one, the same voice, the same thought processes, the same unusual ability to include himself in his judgements about the world, the same generous desire to share his findings, however painful they might be, in the ongoing project that is his examined life: the same bravery. And so that massive absence is addressed directly in the later part of the film: Arthur’s name is spoken, and once it is heard, it’s like a dam breaks and it is everywhere. It is especially present in a scene where Suzie and Nick show us a painting that their lost son did when he was five, which gives the eeriest of “La Jetee” sensations, and which I can’t write about any more because I will cry and I need to be able to see my keyboard. But this is the motion of the film, it moves through cab ride interviews and studio sessions and jokes about Suzie’s habit of constantly rearranging the furniture, in from the fringes, to skirt the center where the hole is, the beginning that happened the day everything ended. It’s a journey that creates an avalanche of empathy.

And perhaps this is the real third dimension in which “One More Time With Feeling” exists — it’s an exploration of music and of grief, but it is also an extraordinary work of friendship on Dominik’s part, of trying to work out how to relate to someone you love, in this unthinkable situation. Part of the pain of grief is that it’s lonely, not because friends and well-wishers abandon you, but precisely because they do not. It’s lonely because you see the sympathy in their eyes, and you know they want to share your hurt and lighten your load, but in situations of extreme loss there is, as Cave puts it perfectly, just no room for anything but the trauma — there is no room to be comforted. So this film is not that, instead with the intelligence and mesmerizing skill that makes him one of the greatest directors working today, Dominik has taken all that useless desire to help and put it away, and instead, side by side with Cave, has made a work of art that breaks your heart, that looks at him, yes, but also looks out at you. It reaches out to you, and reminds you to be kind, because the world’s more full of weeping than we can understand. [A]

Click here to see our full coverage from the 2016 Venice Film Festival.