Lou Reed's 1973 album Berlin, a song cycle about the abusive love affair between an American junkie and his "German queen" Caroline, has always been regarded as one of the legendary moments from the first ten or twelve uneven, often confused years of Reed's post-Velvets solo career. For a long time, the common consensus was that the record was legendary in the same way as the final flight of the Hindenburg; reviews from the time it was first released tended to rate it as something between an embarrassment and a war crime. But Berlin, whose reputation has improved markedly in recent years, has always spoken to a few of us lost souls, and Reed's great fan and baiter, Lester Bangs, was delighted when his hero told him, in the mid-1970s, that of all his solo releases, the only ones of which he was proud were Berlin and the famously unlistenable Metal Machine Music. What with one thing and another, the busy Reed never got around to performing the whole of Berlin live in concert until December 2006, when the first of several performances of the material was staged in New York City at St. Ann's Warehouse, with Reed's mother in attendance. (Maybe Reed put off doing it so long because he was waiting for his mother to become too deaf to hear what he was singing.)
Lou Reed's Berlin is a concert film directed by Julian Schnabel, who also designed the sets. Jonathan Demme demonstrated the perfect way to make a concert movie more than twenty-five years ago: take the cap off the lens and point the camera at the people on stage, preferably after making sure that they will be well lit. The only thing more mystifying than why nobody thought of it before is why anyone has chosen to do things any differently since. Schnabel, who had images projected on a screen behind Reed during the show (including "home movies" featuring Emmanuelle Seigner, who appeared in Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, as Caroline), sometimes lets these take over the movie for seconds at a time. To my surprise, I didn't mind this so much, maybe because it seemed almost like an homage to the cornball theatrics that the producer Bob Ezrin resorted to on the album, where they actually served to balance and undercut the sogginess of Reed's despair in its more callow moments. (Ezrin himself is in the movie, on stage with the musicians, wearing a smock with the word "BERLIN" stenciled on the back and "conducting" the band, and generally looking like a mad scientist on his day off.) I do wish that he hadn't fiddled with some of the shots of the performance itself. But the band-- which includes the invaluable and time-tested Fernando Saunders on bass, and Tony "Thunder" Smith, who during "Caroline Says (I)" looks so excited about what he's a part of that he's in danger of exploding and leaving a small mushroom cloud behind his drum kit--is in fiery top shape, and at some point early on the driving force of the music renders the movie undeniable. (There's just one conspicuous disappointment in the music itself: Reed almost wrecks one of Berlin's finest tunes--"Caroline Says (II)", as lovely a song as ever included the line, "You can hit me all you want/ But I don't love you anymore"), by trying to act it instead of just singing it.) The assembled back-up singers include young women from the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, dressed in green choral robes. I feel inclined to believe that if you can watch their shining, fresh-scrubbed faces as they sing Reed's nasty words while bobbing their heads happily to the music and not feel thrilled to death, you should probably consider relocating to another, duller planet.