Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In a decade full of artists that pushed the boundaries of genre and gender, Grace Jones staked out a kingdom at the crossroads of Amazonian post-punk and androgeneous post-disco. A former model, she was as glamorous as Madonna, as adventurous as David Bowie, and as single minded in her artistic vision as any number of more highly-lauded male stars. And she was fierce. Like Zula, the high-kicking, spear-wielding, somewhat-problematic character she played in 1984’s Conan the Destroyer, Grace Jones took no shit. An ‘80s icon, it’s hard to imagine her as a child, a sister, a mother, or anything other than the visage that jumped off magazine covers and record sleeves, as if she plummeted to Earth from another world encased in glass and fully formed.
The 2017 documentary Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, currently streaming on Hulu and the Criterion Channel, unmasks the dance-pop superheroine and reveals the woman underneath. Directed by documentarian Sophie Fiennes and filmed over 12 years, it finds Jones visiting family in Jamaica, recording her 2008 album Hurricane, and ruminating on her past. The film also contains concert footage of Jones performing some of her biggest hits, showing she’s lost none of her dramatic flair. In between, she butts heads with promoters, managers and errant session musicians. “We are visual artists. We know what things look like,” she argues authoritatively with a television producer, unhappy with her presentation on a French variety show.
Grace Jones was born in 1948 in Spanish Town, Jamaica. For much of her youth, she lived with her maternal grandmother and her husband, Mas P, a cruel disciplinarian who beat Jones and her siblings for the slightest infraction with belts and canes. Reconnecting in her hometown with family, including her brother, the noted Pentecostal Bishop Noel Jones, there’s talk of childhood exploits and family lore, including a grandfather who sired 60 offspring. At the edge of every remembrance, however, are the scars of Mas P’s abuse. “I had so much rage,” Jones says as a result of the experience, something she later learned to channel into her performances and persona.
Locations and dates ebb and flow throughout the film but it never feels disjointed. Rather, the time-space variance echoes Jones’ life, creating a collage which tells her story better than a linear narrative. After Jamaica, Jones would land in Paris, London and New York. Her accent vacillates between all her temporary homelands. Live engagements bring her back to her old haunts, where she laments how lame they’ve become. “11:30 in New York and people are leaving the party? Honey, they must be depressed. This is fucking New York City we’re talking about,” she says incredously.
Visually striking in her natural form, which she’s not shy about showing off during the film, Jones wears one incredible outfit after another in the heat of performance. Tall and physically powerful, all she really needs is a good hat to make an impression. These include a silver reflective bowler hat, a gold skull mask that moves up and down and another chapeau which looks like a cross between a nun’s habit and a giant potato chip. Her band is loosely tight, mixing funk and reggae rhythms with shards of post-punk guitar and percussion on such classics as “Slave to the Rhythm,” “Pull Up to the Bumper” and “Nipple to the Bottle.”
Though Jones appears rootless and struggling professionally, funding her own album and fighting promoters who underdeliver and underpay, she seems personally happy. She cradles her new grandchild lovingly, reconnects with former romantic and artistic partner Jean-Paul Goude and enjoys her time with her kin, even if she has to chug white wine from the bottle before attending church with them. The film ends back in Jamaica, where she chases the sunset over a hill where a hurricane knocked over the family home decades in the past.
Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami is at once impressionistic and detailed. If the film humanizes Jones, it also shows that the woman behind the mask is as formidable and interesting as the icon. What emerges is an engaging profile of one of the most groundbreaking artists of the 1980s and one of the most influential female artists of all time. Pushing 70 at the time of filming, Jones still parties, dances, and performs with fearless abandon. “What really counts is when I die, I want to die happy,” she says at one point. Somebody tells her to smoke a joint just before she dies, to which she replies, “I’m not sure about the joint. I might do acid or ecstasy, holding someone’s hand.”
Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.
