What is there to say beyond the title? I was really disappointed in this doc, for several reasons. Some of them technical: the timeline was jumbled and very few facts are given. If you didn't know the story of Holiday already, you most likely would feel pretty confused. This would have been excusable if the audio interviews that the journalist apparently spent years collecting would have thrown up a lot of new information, but actually, there was nothing new at all, beyond a few small anecdotes. Perhaps the audio tapes contained nothing new or because of the choices of the film maker, but the audio was a mish-mash of unrelated stories, some of them interesting, some of them not so much, but rarely set in a clear timeline, and mostly of a personal nature. There was almost nothing about what made Billie Holiday such a great singer. Because of this focus on the personal, the end result was for the most part a portrayal of a tragic woman who was a victim of circumstances, exactly what Linda Kuehl had set out to avoid. The main thing this doc had going for it was some great footage of Holiday performing; however, and I may be wrong, some of it looked like it had been colored in.
Billie
(2019)
Doc that sets out not to portray Billie Holiday as a victim portrays her as a victim
25 October 2021