Australian rock icon Nick Cave has not been idle during Covid lockdown. After recording the highly acclaimed Ghosteen album with The Bad Seeds in 2019, the band’s touring plans were postponed by the pandemic, so instead Cave made a concert film and live album of socially distanced solo piano pieces, Idiot Prayer. In early 2021, the singer released Carnage, a collection of meditative ambient torch songs recorded with his longtime musical foil, Warren Ellis. A year ago, as the duo cautiously drew up plans to return to playing live with a pared-down show based on both albums, they called on their friend and regular collaborator, New Zealand-born film director Andrew Dominik, to document these embryonic performances.
This Much I Know To Be True is the result, a music-heavy film which premieres at the Berlinale this week. It is billed as a “companion piece” to Dominik’s One More Time With Feeling (2016), which documented the making of the Bad Seeds album Skeleton Tree. Shot in just five days, this semi-sequel is pitched squarely at Cave devotees, a snapshot of his most recent career phase with little in the way of explanatory context or biographical back story. But as a sumptuous audiovisual distillation of two exquisite albums, this is a fan-friendly feast, with the roving camera of feted Irish cinematographer and Ken Loach regular Robbie Ryan endlessly whirling and dancing around the musicians in their cavernous, beautifully lit, elegantly shabby rehearsal space.
One More Time With Feeling was overshadowed by the accidental death of Cave’s teenage son Arthur in 2015. These tragic events are never mentioned overtly in This Much I Know To Be True, but they clearly run deep through the songs from Ghosteen and Carnage, which seem to emerge from a glistening dreamscape of love and loss. While Waiting for You aches with inconsolable grief, the tender electronic reveries Lavender Fields and Galleon Ship are transformed into soaring avant-gospel spirituals by a trio of backing singers.
But there is humour and levity amidst all this solemnity. Opening on an incongruously bizarre tangent, Dominik first shoots Cave working on a series of resin sculptures of the Devil, which is so close to self-parody it almost feels like one of the fake autobiographical vignettes the singer staged in his semi-fictional documentary 20,000 Days on Earth (2014). Between musical sections, Dominik includes informal interview snippets with the duo, all punctuated with deadpan Australian wit. On the topic of his working methods with Ellis, Cave says “a whole lot of terrible shit happens when me and Warren get into a room.” A brief phone-call cameo by Cave’s actor son Earl, Arthur’s twin brother, inspires one of the best jokes in the film. Sportingly, the singer tells it against himself.
Another brief non-musical section delves into Cave’s online project The Red Hand Files, begun soon after Arthur’s death, in which he invites questions on any topic and publishes lengthy, lyrical, thoughtful replies. Many of the correspondents are struggling with tragedy and trauma themselves. Cave calls this his “spiritual practise” and credits it with making him a more compassionate husband, father and friend. The singer’s unlikely new sideline an an internet agony uncle has certainly been extraordinary to witness, and arguably deserves its own stand-alone documentary.
The most jarring interlude in This Much I Know To Be True is a guest appearance by veteran rock diva Marianne Faithfull, sickly and wheezing from a severe bout of Covid, who performs a spoken-word piece over an ambient sound bed provided by Ellis. This is a track from She Walks in Beauty, the duo’s 2021 album of 19th century romantic poems, but its inclusion here feels incongruous, and Faithfull looks decidedly uncomfortable on camera. “I hope you’re not filming this,” she scolds Dominik as she struggles to breathe without her oxygen mask. Faithfull undoubtedly cleared this footage later, but her awkward cameo still feels superfluous here, with only a tenuous connection to the main project at hand. This lack of structure or context is a little odd, but only a minor niggle in an otherwise consistently engrossing documentary. Sublime devotional music, lovingly immortalised on film.
Director: Andrew Dominik
With: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Marianne Faithfull. Wendi Rose. Janet Ramus, TJae Cole, Eloisa-Fleur Thom. Alessandro Ruisi, Luba Tunnicliffe, Max Ruisi
Cinematography: Robbie Ryan
Editing: Matthew C. Hart
Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis
Producers: Isaac Hoff, Bethany Clayton, Amy James
Production companies: Bad Seed Ltd (UK), Uncommon Creative Studios (UK)
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Special Screening)
In English
105 minutes