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Director Alexandria Bombach has benefited from the archival instincts of music Amy Ray in this captivating new documentary.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
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The Indigo Girls have been strong for more than 40 years, and perhaps the key to their resilience is that they’ve never been great. Often, the scenario was worse: Even in their advertising heyday in the ’80s and ’90s, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers were mocked for being too serious, too poetic, too folky, and too lesbian. At the time, being classified as a gay singer-songwriter was an artistic and publicity curse, as Ray recalls in “It’s Only Life After All. “”A smart and compelling new documentary.
The director, Alexandria Bombach, benefited greatly from Ray’s archival instincts: the musician put away decades of artifacts and opened his vault; the 1981 essays, recorded on tape when Ray and Saliers were teenagers, are strangely sharp records of nascent chemistry, for example.
From this clay, Bombach sculpted the poignant portrait of two women who stayed true to their convictions and, equally important, their loyalty to each other. Existing enthusiasts will be mesmerized, but non-enthusiasts like me also enjoy “It’s Only Life. “After all. ” The film is particularly effective at contextualizing the band’s rise amid (at best) condescension from the mainstream media (their dramatic and very funny reading of a harrowing 1989 review in the New York Times is the highlight) with their non-public struggles, and continued political engagement for causes, adding the Indigenous-led organization Honor the Earth.
Now that the band is in a cultural moment: Their hit “Closer to Fine” was featured prominently in “Barbie” and in a jukebox musical movie about their songs, “Glitter
After all, that’s life. Unclassified. Duration: 2 hours 3 minutes. In rooms.
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