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Kurt & Courtney
A Shocking Documentary
Journal de Montreal
1998
British director Nick Broomfield apparently loves controversy. With documentaries like Soldier girls, Aileen Wuornos: the selling
of a serial killer, Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam et Fetishes, he made himself a reputation of bomb flamer able to dig far to cause some waves.
This documentary already caused a little controversy at the beginning of year. This documentary, which scans the twisted universe of the late rock'n'roll singer Kurt Cobain and of the rock'n'roll singer Courtney Love (today widowed of Cobain) has made people talk. The lawyers of Love saw there a not very flattering portrait of their client and thus tried to prevent the release of this documentary, without any successes.
However, the American wide-area network Showtime withdrew its financial support to the Broomfield documentary without shouting guard. And in January, we learned that the Sundance Film Festival of Robert Redford had closed its doors to the Broomfield documentary, affirming that Broomfield had not been able to obtain the rights for the diffusion of the Nirvana repertory in its film. Ironically, Redford and Love are both part of the same marketing team.
Why these madnesses? Because Kurt and Courtney draws up a disturbing portrait of Courtney Love, a woman with a doubtful past, which nowadays, plays the great game of the show business among the Hollywood stars, to undoubtedly erase this lost reputation that follows her since her beginning in the arena of the rock'n'roll. In 95 minutes, Broomfield tries to determinate the past of Kurt Cobain while throwing a little light on its suicide.
With very limited means (a camera, a microphone) he tries to research the Cobain myth on the not very accessible roads of Seattle and Portland. On his way, it meet Cobain's aunt, his ex, his best friend. People who affirms to have well known Cobain and who affirms that Courtney Love perhaps contributed to the death of the singer, by killing him or, quite simply, by leading him to suicide.
The trouble, it is that the majority of the people interviewed do not have any credibility.Can we believe the testimony of a guy obviously stoned who can hardly speak in a coherent way? Can we believe the testimony of the singer El Duce, a kind of human bulldog which affirms to have received an offer of 50 000 $ to kill Cobain on the behalf of Courtney Love? Can we believe all these girls with a stoned look, girls who do not seem to live on the same planet as us?
Fortunately the more the investigation advances, the more Broomfield realize that his wasting his time with idiots (like Hank Harrison, father of Love). He refuses to accuse Courtney Love of the murder of Cobain, but ends up underlining the paranoid dimensions of Love personality, by pointing out her brawls and her threats towards some journalists. This documentary,
which at the beginning, seems cast in the mould of the useless and ridicule of sensationalism, thus finishes in beauty by a scene who is worth the entrance fee: a face-to-face with Courtney Love at her arrival at the American Civil Liberties Union official reception.
No, Kurt and Courtney does not answer has the famous question - who killed Kurt Cobain- that still worries America. The work of Broomfield, very attractive in the last analysis, recalls us that not everything is known yet. That things are being hidden from us. That under her mascara and her Gucci clothes, Courtney Love remains one power-hungry girl who does not appreciate the foreigners in her kingdom. A woman who prefers to hide under the capital of a large Hollywood circus rather than reconsider a past which could haunted her forever.
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