The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 28

THE GUARDIAN Thursday September 16 1993 DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST Dir: Julie Dash With Adisa Anderson, Alva Rogers 113 mins, no cert. ICA ACCION MUTANTE Dir: Alex de la Inglesia With Antonio Resides, Frederique Feder 90 mins, cert 18. MGMs Haymarket, Tottenham Court Road etc WHATS LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT Dir: Brian Gibson With Angela Bassett, Larry Fishburne 118 mins, cert IB. Odeon West End, Electric, MGM Chelsea etc THE BABY OF MACON Dir: Peter Greenaway With Ralph Fiennes, Julia Ormond 120 mins, cert 1B. Lumiere, Gate etc Derek Malcolm HOWBIZ biographies are I often fun but seldom -t IT17 much weight on ya.

1 Itheir entertaining shoulders. Brian Gibson's What's Love Got To Do With It attempts, while hardly subverting the genre, to buck the trend a little in the tell-all nineties. The film traverses the life story of Tina Turner with respect for most of the conventions but little attempt to play down the misery of the rock superstar's life with Ike, her violent and unpredictable ex-husband. Nor, of course, did Turner's own written biography, upon which the film is based. But this is a reasonably substantial retelling of the story of poor choirgirl Annie Mae Bullock, whose career as Tina Turner was crowned by triumph over adversity and near-disaster, though it is fair game to suppose that the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not on the agenda.

What is required are strong central performances. And this is what the film delivers through the agency not only of Angela Basse tt as Tina but also, and as crucially, of Larry Fishbume as Ike. The former has Oscar nomination written all over it, not only because Bassett, who jealousy seem part and parcel of the same nerve-crunching celebrity game James Mason played with Judy Garland in George Cukor's A Star Is Bom. As in that film, there is manufactured melodrama. The scene where Ike gives members of his audience a chance on stage and is then astonished by her natural talent is straight out of any old uplifting Hollywood rags-tc-riches biog.

But the film goes further than that sort of thing. It is in the end principally about how Tina had the courage to break free from her Svengali straight to hell, and to forge her own style despite all the warnings that it wouldn't work, and thus to transcend all expectations a second time. This is done using old and re-recorded versions of Turner's hits, by evoking the sixties and played Malcolm X's wife in Spike Lee's film, so strenuously succeeds in her stage impersonation of Turner, but because she also has the dramatic strength to surmount the real obstacle: to avoid what happened to Robert Downey Jr in Chaplin, which was to add very little besides a superb approximation of a real-life giant on the screen. Fishburne's performance, however, caps even that in what could have been a pretty ungrateful part He makes us see why Dee behaved as he did and, if not to sympathise with his treatment of Tina Turner, at least to understand his predicament She was, after all, his creature plucked out of obscurity, fitted up for stardom and worked like a dray-horse to achieve it And when that stardom came, and his own faded, the black rages and the consuming seventies in considerable detail without turning to fake cameos of the famous of the era and through Gibson's sheer persistence in gaining maximum effect from the performances themselves. When the real Tina takes a kind of curtain call at the end, you feel somehow cheated.

Reality has been so efficiently manufactured that the spell is broken when it doesn't have to be conjured up anymore. What's Love Got To Do With It may not be quite in the class of George Cukor but it's a lot better, for instance, than Mark RydeU's picking of the bones of Janis Joplin in The Rose. Peter Greenaway's The Baby Of Macon, one of the chief disappointments of this year's Cannes Festival, seems a sad decline not because of what it tries to encompass but because of the way it does so, which is in no way comparable to the icy certainty of The Cook, The Thief or the better moments of the director's provoking and imaginative conception of The Tempest in Prospero's Books. Set within the confines of the great cathedral of Macon during the period of the baroque counter-reformation, its story is told as a three-act play before an audience which gleefully participates in its cruel parable. A grotesquely pregnant old woman bears a miracle child.

Her ambitious daughter claims the boy, imprisons her mother and reaps the rewards of selling the child's blessings. Dressed like the Virgin Mary, and claiming a virgin birth, she attempts to seduce the priest's son. the baby, voiced by the stage-prompter, prevents it. The child is taken into the care of the Church exploited further. Its bodily liquids are auctioned.

In revenge, the daughter of the true mother suffocates the child and condemned to death. But, being officially a virgin, she cannot be killed. Instead, she is raped to death the militia with the blessing of Church. Within the hearing of audience, who do not know that reality has finally overtaken drama, the actress playing the sister perishes from the ordeal. The Church triumphs and heaven is hell.

The odious ritual rape, during which the number of men taking part are meticulously counted one by one in what looks like a deliberate attempt to engage our emotions uneasily, may well be too difficult for many to take. Yet this elabo rately staged and copiously detailed study of duplicity, greed and hypocrisy fails not so much on any moral count but simply because it is technically deficient. Its crowded canvas, often lit by Sacha Vierny and marshalled by Greenaway so that you can barely see what is going on, is not illuminated by a screenplay of much distinction nor by acting that manages to do more than hint at the flesh and blood behind the ornate travesty. All the glories of Ben Van Os and Jan Roelf production design and Dien Van Straalen's costumes, and certainly the magnificence of the setting, are thus minimised if not fatally undermined. What is clearly intended to be a horrifying pageant inexorably linked to our own times, in which the play's audience, and thus ourselves, are partners, becomes instead a curiously stultifying experience, messily involved in obscure detail and references most would have to pick up on a second viewing.

In short, the ambition of The Baby Of Macon is betrayed by handling that consistently engages the curiosity without clarifying its true purpose. What could have been a brilliantly savage morality play, and a scourge for anyone's soul, turns out to be merely intellectually condescending, dramatically muddied and simply not good enough to pass muster from the considerably talented hands of Britain's most perversely brilliant film-maker. Julie Dash's Daughters Of The Dust is an intriguing attempt, set in the Sea Islands along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia at the turn of the century, to link black America's African heritage to its present and future. It follows the fortunes of a Gullah family living and working on the inhospitable islands on the eve of their migration to the beckoning north. The women, in particular, speaking the local patois, are the chief protagonists of a film structured like a costume drama en tableaux in order to mirror, through its almost stately progress, what the director calls "the packed away sorrows of African American Dash's sumptuous images at times seem ponderous and theatrical.

But the more Daughters Of The Dust progresses, the more radically different and valid it seems. It's a true original and, as such, of considerable value both as a film and as a sad yet hopeful summation of history as memory and experience. Alex de la Inglesia's Accion Mutante is a Spanish horror-cum-science fiction epic from the stable of Pedro Almodovar that is so determinedly anarchic as to be appealing at least to the lower end of the video market, or even to hopeful discoverers of cinematic camp. It's Mad Max on a couple of thousand pesetas as a band of handicapped renegades attempt to destroy a style-conscious society, circa 2012, that has attempted to ostracise them. You could read meaning into this if you like, but it wouldn't be wise to seek other than a certain visual panache and a jokey determination at all costs to surprise.

rt But and is by the the 1 1 "ij Peter Greenaway defends his new film, The Baby Of Macon, on page 6. Angela Bassett puts on a superb performance as Tina Turner in Brian Gibson's showbiz biog, What's Love Got To Do With It.