Filmmaker Julien Temple knows the Sex Pistols from A to Z. Literally.
The organizers of the Dinard Festival of British Cinema, on France’s Emerald Coast, wanted to do a tribute to Temple the first weekend in October but couldn’t get their hands on a print of the irreverent film that catapulted him into the spotlight. So Temple dug out his own copy of 1980’s “The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle,” his energetic riff on proto-punk trailblazers the Sex Pistols. When the 12-reel feature arrived, the local projectionist discovered that one reel was missing and a reel of Costa-Gavras’ Oscar-winning political thriller “Z” had taken its place. “I hadn’t looked in those cans in ages,” admitted the trim, francophile helmer, taking the inexplicable in stride.
Twenty years after “Swindle” launched his bloody but unbowed career (Temple’s rather enjoyable screen version of “Absolute Beginners” took a critical hammering in 1986 that might have driven lesser artists to imbibe hemlock), Temple wielded his formidable intellect and sly sense of humor to revisit the Sex Pistols’ legacy in “The Filth and the Fury” (L’Obscénité et la fureur, Nov 15), a superb documentary that deftly segues from Laurence Olivier intoning “Now is the winter of our discontent” to the year-round discontent of the unfettered gents who created “Never Mind the Bollocks” from their own blood, sweat and tears.
A quarter of a century after they took a weather-obsessed country by storm, it’s easy to forget the impact the mad-as-hell Pistols had on staid, not terribly merry Olde England. Their antics, as chronicled by tabloids that managed to rave more stridently than Johnny Rotten himself, sold more newspapers than Armistice Day. Temple, who also directed “At the Max,” the IMAX concert film of a longer-lasting British export, the Rolling Stones, says: “I could never have made a film like this about the Stones because if you ask Mick Jagger why he did it, he wouldn’t be able to answer. He’d have no idea. But the Sex Pistols were brilliant. They were incredibly smart men posing as dumb guys who swore and threw up a lot. They were furious about the fact that a huge chunk of British society really had no future and they expressed that anger because they had to. They dressed in the manner that came to be identified as “punk” because they had no money. They held their clothes together with safety pins out of necessity. They were appalled to be perceived as purveyors of fashion rather than bearers of an important message, a political message, which is, quite simply, that you must be who you are, take responsibility into your own hands for the contours of your life and not kowtow to the ruling class. Be yourself. Express yourself.”
If you thought the Sex Pistols could safely be categorized and dismissed as untalented, antisocial and (as the song goes) “pretty vacant,” then after seeing the very clever, civic-minded and instructional “The Filth and the Fury,” you’ll be ashamed of yourself for only having taken in the frosty tip of a very substantial iceberg. The Sex Pistols wanted you to question authority. They did not want you to spit on things (Rotten simply had bad sinuses as the result of a yearlong childhood coma) or show chronic disrespect to the Queen. Sid Vicious may have been the most visible casualty of an eventual media circus whose detrimental effects were compounded by egregious mismanagement, but the Sex Pistols were bright and blazing stars, well worth revisiting via “The Filth and the Fury’s” celluloid firmament.
Temple, who is so taken with the French Revolution that he uses the revolutionaries’ names for the months of the year (“When did we shoot the ‘My Way’ sequence with Sid Vicious in Paris? It wasn’t in Thermidor...”), who made 1998’s “Vigo” about the short life of pioneer French filmmaker Jean Vigo and whose next project is about the last day of Marie-Antoinette, has recently made a visual feast out of a vivid period in British literary history. Due out next year is “Pandaemonium,” a wrenchingly extravagant look at the tumultuous lives of poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Linus Roache) and William Wordsworth (John Hannah). Temple makes poetry and poets seem as volatile as radioactive isotopes and uses a stupendous assortment of bold filmic tricks to render viewers giddy with the possibilities of the natural landscape and drunk with the temptations of long since outlawed mind-altering draughts. I emerged from the theater wanting to kiss the hems of history’s wordsmiths. Movies had not yet been invented when Coleridge struggled to write “Kubla Khan,” but I am here to report that Temple’s latest two films are invitations to the Pleasure Dome.
