“24/7” Music: ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ and ‘Eden’

Anyone could make a pretty good video montage of Nina Simone in popular culture: first that iconic Chanel commercial featuring Simone’s version of “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” then an early pre-Wallace-and-Gromit Aardman Studios short in which a sexy, clay-mation cat chanteuse sings the same song (in Simone’s voice), and finally Julie Delpy near the very end of ‘Before Sunset’ imitating Simone’s stage patter (white people, please, let’s not mimic Black people ever) for Ethan Hawke.

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Anyone could make a pretty good video montage of Nina Simone in popular culture: first that iconic Chanel commercial featuring Simone’s version of “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” then an early pre-Wallace-and-Gromit Aardman Studios short in which a sexy, clay-mation cat chanteuse sings the same song (in Simone’s voice), and finally Julie Delpy near the very end of Before Sunset imitating Simone’s stage patter (white people, please, let’s not mimic Black people ever) for Ethan Hawke. But what these clips lack is Simone’s face, when her dark skin, wide nose, and full lips differentiated her from other Black women who were popular stars in the mid-twentieth century, like Diahann Carroll and Lena Horne, and even the Black women we see in movies and TV today. A recent bio-pic of Simone, which never had a real release in theaters, featured lighter-skinned star Zoe Saldana wearing dark makeup and a fake nose to play one of the first Black woman entertainers who performed with her hair natural and long earrings that brushed her shoulders in African-inspired dresses and head wraps.

Liz Garbus’s new documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone? (which opens in New York this week and will be streaming on Netflix starting this Friday, June 26) has glorious closeups of Simone’s face throughout. The film commences with a clip of a live performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival when, after a long glare at the audience, she says, “We’ll start from the beginning.”

Simone grew up poor in the Jim Crow South, but because her mother was a preacher, played the piano from a young age. At a church concert a couple of white women recognized Simone’s talent and she began to train as a classical pianist with the town’s white instructor. Simone practiced seven or eight hours every day, so even as a child was isolated from her peers, both Black and white. Segregation kept her from fulfilling her early dream; although she was able to attend Julliard (thanks to fundraising efforts in her hometown) she failed her audition for The Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. She later learned she was turned down because she was Black (a side note: classical auditions are now conducted with the musician hidden from view, a change that has been key in helping modern orchestras get closer to gender parity).

Simone adopted the pseudonym we know her by (she was born Eunice Waymon­­) taking “Nina” from a boyfriend’s nickname for her and “Simone” from the French actress Simone Signoret to perform the “devil’s music” in bars to support herself and her family. She had never sung before but was told at her first job she had to. Incorporating virtuoso piano technique with the greatest jazz improvisers’ instincts (Simone says she would sometimes change key in the middle of a song–her longtime guitarist Al Schackman was one of the few musicians who could keep up with her) along with a beautiful, distinctive voice and a deep, emotional connection to whatever she sang, she soon became a star. She performed blues, pop, and jazz songs as well as show tunes, remaking each of them in her own style. As critic Stanley Crouch says during the film, no one would ever mistake her work for that of anyone else.

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Nina Simone prepares for a concert

 

She married a New York vice cop, Andrew Stroud, who became her manager (which rarely turns out well). He physically and sexually abused her and pushed her to perform and tour more, even as she, like a lot of musicians who while away much of their childhood practicing, began to question if she really wanted a music career.

The civil rights movement gave her renewed purpose: she cultivated friendships with other Black artists, like Langston Hughes (who co-wrote with her “Backlash Blues”) and Lorraine Hansberry (the godmother of Simone’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, who is interviewed extensively in the film). Simone also performed for the marchers with Martin Luther King at Selma and wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in response to the killing of Medgar Edgers and the four little girls in Alabama. She was close to Malcolm X’s wife and children and lived a short distance from them in Mount Vernon, New York, where her daughter became an honorary member of their family.

Like many others from that era she became disillusioned in the wake of the assassinations of civil rights leaders, and when the revolution so many spoke of and believed in during the 1960s never came. Manifesting symptoms of the bipolar disorder doctors would eventually diagnose (her mental illness was probably exacerbated by the beatings) she abandoned her marriage–and, for a time, her daughter–and never lived in the United States again.

The film has many great performance clips of Simone (including a moment in Montreux where she goes from palpable anger to laughter as an audience member spontaneously shouts out to her). I wish the film included even more of Simone’s music. The interviews are all first-rate and thorough, even as the interviewees, like Stroud and Schackman, seem to have opposing viewpoints. Lisa Simone Kelly is remarkably even-tempered in her remembrances of her mother as a genius and a star, but also as the person who physically and emotionally abused her. She says, “People think that when she came out onstage she became Nina Simone. My mother was Nina Simone 24/7 and that’s where it became a problem.”

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In theory I’m the ideal audience member to see Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest film, a fictionalized bio of her brother Sven Hansen-Løve (he co-wrote the script) about his days as a well-known DJ in Paris. Although I’ve never been to Paris, I spent enough time in US clubs in the 1990s that when I recognized a familiar song quietly humming in the background of an early scene, I started swaying in my seat in anticipation of hearing the song at full volume and becoming enveloped in a mass of lights and dancing bodies. But those few faint notes were all the film included; the characters end up walking away from the music in that scene, a metaphor for the film itself.

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A frustrated couple in a frustrating film

 

We all want to do the best we can for our families (well, most of us do) but Hansen-Løve seems to have zero affinity for the music, fashion, atmosphere, and dancing of the club scene in the ’90s and 2000s. Her idea of a great club scene is one in which the main character says of Daft Punk, “They’re killing it,” instead of letting us see, hear, and come to that conclusion ourselves. She should have steered her brother to a different director.

Additionally, the women in the life of the main character, who never gives us any reason to care about him, Paul (Félix de Givry) are, with one exception, nothing more than the interchangeable ciphers we’ve seen in every movie about straight, white, male protagonists. Each woman is ready to drop everything, either to accompany Paul on his US tour or clean up after him when he vomits. Greta Gerwig, in an English-speaking role, is the only one allowed ambitions of her own and she is on screen far too briefly.

Somewhere in this film of club scenes that are often tedious and indistinguishable from each other (Eden is 131 minutes long, but you’ll swear it lasts the same couple of decades the film covers) is the bare bones of a decent story: what it’s like to outlive the fashionability of one’s talents and tastes. After a disastrous gig, a drunk and drugged-out Paul is carried home from the club by his friends and as they pass an older woman on the staircase she says something about, “The youth of today.”

He retorts, “I’m 34!” That’s a pretty good line, but it’s the only one in this morass of a film.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Rethinking Sex Trafficking and Voyeurism: ‘Taken’ and ‘Eden’

Written by Rachel Redfern

The current Hollywood climate and the overwhelming ridiculousness of most of the big blockbusters being churned out of that machine is something that we talk about a lot over here at Bitch Flicks. The problems with a lack of unique female characters, general lack of original plot and substantive dialogue are just a few of the major problems going on right now. But on top of that has been a trend I recently noticed concerning our portrayal of sex trafficking as a tool to demonstrate the general kick-ass, uber-masculine, damsel-in-distress saving, action star. Specifically, I’m talking about the films Taken, Taken 2, and Trade.

In this case, the horrific abuse that is the daily life of many sex trafficking victims is wantonly used as mere shock factor, and in the process, allows a seedy voyeurism of the acts of torture and sexual assault that happen in such films. Does it do more harm or good to have such shocking and graphic scenes portrayed so cavalierly? For instance, the harm comes from using shocking scenes as a way to drive up viewership and glamorizing a very real global human rights violation; the good comes from the fact that these intense films do have a large viewership and in that, those films can spread awareness of the issue.

The issue is a complicated one and I have written about it for other venues here, but despite the fact that there are some very problematic films about sex trafficking running around out there, there are also some very good ones. Specifically, the 2012 film, Eden, directed by Megan Griffiths and just released on DVD last month. 

Jamie Chung as Eden

Eden is based off the true-life story of Chong Kim (Jamie Chung), a young Korean American woman who was kidnapped and sold into sex slavery in the United States. Many do not realize that the United States is unfortunately a huge participant in the importation and the exploitation of immigrations and US citizens in the global sex trafficking trade.

Eden chronicles Chong’s two years of experiences in a well-connected, organized prostitution ring within the American Southwest. Chong (renamed Eden by the organization) begins to climb the ladder of her own organization as a way to survive and eventually escape, an action that fully demonstrates the twisted reach of the organization.

Eden is a slow-moving tale, one that takes time to develop and highlight the changes and trauma that are influencing Chong, allowing the story, and Chong’s character, to grow as a result. The film is episodic in nature, skipping ahead to highlight significant moments within her capture and showcasing the passage of time.

As well, the fact that the United States has a substantial piece of the sex trafficking trade is exposed in this film. Eden is grounded in the US experience, even showing Chong within a standard US suburb being shuttled too and from homes as a prostitute. The landscape is familiar, as are the men and women she comes into contact with; it’s horrifying to realize how easily sex trafficking and its victims slip in and out of American life.
 

Jamie Chung as Eden–making her way up the ladder of the organization


Chong is an American citizen, and Eden portrays how many of the women are young American youths who have been sold or have run away from home. But Chong also has Asian heritage from her Korean parents, which means that in the film she must pretend to be an underage Chinese prostitute as a gimmick to get clients, a horrifically true detail that Chong Kim talks about here in an excerpt (page 11-12). Immigrants are usually considered the largest target of sex trafficking. It’s horrible to realize that such a situation is considered sexually desirable by some who use prostitutes.

But the film never explicitly shows the rape or torture scenes. We are aware of what’s happening and even of the effect that these actions have on Eden, but neither are we made to be participants in the same actions that the film is portraying. In fact, in this instance, not showing is a far more effective tool in demonstrating the seriousness and reality of sex trafficking. Instead of the focus being placed on the gratuitously violent rape-torture scene, the focus can instead be placed on how this trauma is affecting her, how the organization operates, and its insidious place within much of mainstream society.

Rather than focusing on the big man coming to save her, Eden is about her experiences, how she learns to survive, how she uses her own resources to facilitate her escape. That’s not to say that sex trafficking victims should in any way shape or form be responsible for their removal from sex trafficking, but it is important that films don’t just use sex trafficking as an action movie plot device.

Eden may be a little slow-moving, and I think it could have been longer, giving even more time to show Eden’s development and the effects of sex trafficking, but on the whole, Eden is a fine independent film, by a young and upcoming female director. We need more films telling subtle and focused stories about the thousands of victims of sex trafficking around the world. 



  
Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection; however, she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.