Review by Molly Page
The Best Summer reminded me a lot of 1991: The Year Punk Broke because of it’s a blend of concert videos and behind the scenes of the tour. The home video aesthetic really brings you back in time, its imperfections add to its authenticity. Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill or 100% by Sonic Youth are filmed really well then others like Beck have terrible sound and poor focus. But in many ways it’s quite the privilege to see these bands at their heights, or just starting out at a time where performances were often not filmed. There were no iphones so there weren’t five different angles of an event happening. Most of this footage has been unseen, undocumented. Until now.
It’s a time capsule of an exact moment in these bands lives, and knowing what happens and the context makes this film so interesting. Kathleen Hannah is meeting Adam Horowitz for the first time, unaware that in a year they will be dating and later married. Her conversations with Tamra about cute boys being on the tour, and her answer being that there is none. The moment they try to interview him where she blushes and has to walk away. The Foo Fighters only just formed in 1994 and had started their first performances in 1995. Dave Grohl here is still working out how to be a frontman and how to perform differently to how he did for Nirvana. Expressing how he hates chatting in between songs or even singing, reflecting how different this role is to him. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon trying to figure out how marriage and having a child works into the routine of a rock star. Footage of Coco travelling along with them, alongside her babysitter. To see these people on the cusp of something, dealing with their current issues and seeing how that paints their answers to the interview questions is engaging.
Speaking of, I find the discussions sparked by Kathleen Hannah’s questions to be the most thought provoking aspect to this documentary. What is the best or worst part of performing on stage, and do you try to separate your public persona from your private one? Each interviewee gives a different answer, which really looks at how they view and treat fame. How their different levels of fame contribute to the answer. Or even the gendered aspects; the conversation between Kathleen and Dave Grohl in particular highlights this. Dave says he views being up on stage like being on a blind date, where he wants to try and keep the conversation with the crowd. Through this relation by Grohl, there gives a sense that he is being himself, not fully, but there isn’t a separate performance. He is not a different persona. But Kathleen likens her experience to being like a prostitute, where on stage is very much a performance, she is not being herself. To her it is important that she invokes a persona. This idea that women are so aware of being perceived that they act differently on stage or need a persona to protect themselves. This divide is present over a lot of the answers. Stephen Malkmus of Pavement replies that he is the same, and that he is always self conscious and introverted, which lends itself to a private life anyway. However Kim Gordon is reflective of how she is perceived on stage by others, whether by critics, or how her marriage is depicted. She talks about how she likes to embody many different personas, like sometimes acting like french actress Anna Karina.
What makes these discussions interesting is that we still have these conversations today, albeit through pop music discourse. But obviously on a much larger scale, as now we have social media and direct access to the musicians at all times. Complicating the divides between public and private. Where female pop stars need to determine how much of themselves they put into their music and on stage, whether it be Taylor Swift’s intensely personal and confessional style or Chappell Roan’s persona and fight to have a private life.
If anything I left wishing I could have a deep conversation with Kathleen Hannah, who not only asks interesting questions but always interrogates the questions further. Someone who has a fun and upbeat presence over the film but also has these very intellectual and well thought out manner of speaking.
Overall whether this documentary works for you, is dependent on how much you like or know about the bands included. But, this film is a testament to the music festival, and at a time where many Australian music festivals are faltering because of funds, this film stands to remind us of their importance and why we should strive to bring them back.