Reviews

I have a replica of one of Matisse's Blue Women perched up on my wardrobe, watching me sleep. She was made by my ex, whom I still see often and like very much, and it reclines with a natural grace against an almost empty clay pot and a very old Winnie the Pooh teddy bear. In that context Matisse is a warm hug, the smell of cumin, the feeling of a sleeping cat on one's legs. Even in the gallery, where Matisse often loses something, he rarely feels less than pleasant.

Play Jazz renders Matisse in such a way, with the stuttering motion and the scanlines, that his aesthetic is transposed into a hideous 80s corporate gothic. The move is a vital and bold one simply as an act of resetting the familiar, but the film does barely any work in selling me on this and rather I feel as though it's my own brain that has come up with all of the beauty. I could have done the same thing by walking over to the abandoned textile factory and standing by the big pile of burnt out TVs coated in the colourful spray paint of graffiti. I don't normally like dismissing art as not worth my time on the basis that it doesn't provide me with something unique; I'd struggle to justify listening to so much jungle if that were the case. Something about the choice of jazz as subject matter justifies my low score here: Bechet's fantastic solo cannot be corporatised so easily, and it makes the aesthetic I describe above feel incomplete. The film is better than most would give it credit for, but it's not enough for me.