Her Smell (2019) - Movie Review

After how dirty Elisabeth Moss was done with The Kitchen, I was honestly wanting to check this film out mainly because she deserves better than having just that movie as her impact for 2019. And it seems that writer/producer/director Alex Ross Perry has given her a role she can really sink her teeth into, playing a riot grrrl punk rocker who, in expected rock star cinema fashion, crashes and burns under the weight of her shot at fame. Going from a role that outright wasted her talents to something that lets the entire production spin on the axis of her performance is very gratifying to see, and the film as a whole ain’t half bad either.

Told through a collection of five vignettes, capturing Moss’ Becky Something at different stages of her breakdown and eventual recovery, this film starts out on a really confronting note with how it’s framed. Floating through Becky’s on-stage and back-stage antics with Sean Price Williams’ claustrophobic camera work, the way the film goes about demystifying the typical rock star image is one of the best attempts I’ve ever seen. With Becky’s perpetual mood swings taking centre stage, the image we get of a rock star struggling to cope with her own artistic decline is incredibly tough to watch.

Admittedly, the difficulty in watching it is down to both how up-the-nose the framing can get, making it impossible to be distracted by anything else going on, and with how adamant the scripting can get in highlight just how pretentious Becky, and by extension the rock star image itself, ultimately is. Speaking in continual purple prose, like she’s constantly in the process of writing lyrics for songs, demanding obedience from everyone around her, and leaning on her own personal shaman to deal with her spiritual healing. It’s all shown as a series of crutches that Becky leans on so that she doesn’t have to come to terms with the sole source of her problems: Not her bandmates, not her manager, not her family, but herself.

It’s sobering in a very literal sense, and as we see Becky collapse and then slowly rebuild, it really ends up highlighting why films like The Dirt underperformed as much as they did. In bringing larger-than-life characters like this to the big screen, there’s an innate want to keep that grandeur intact for the sake of engagement; it’s like the cinematic equivalent of the ‘sell the sizzle, not the steak’ marketing mantra. But in dispelling that myth, Her Smell manages to emphasise why such a dismantlement is necessary: Because for the icons themselves and for those who gravitate towards them, this very idolatrous mentality can do a lot of damage to the mind and heart. It’s an intimate, almost suffocating, look at someone who learns to lose their superficial armour and embrace what really matters, not the least of which being their own humanity.