Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles

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Summary: Informative, imaginative intro to engimatic Paul Bowles
Review: Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal's Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles (1998), winner of the International Emmy Award for Best Documentary, explores the life and works of one of the most enigmatic artists of the twentieth century: composer, author, translator, expatriate, and iconoclast Paul Bowles (1910-1999).

Against the backdrop of exotic North Africa, the enigma of Bowles begins to unravel in this imaginatively-made film. Interviews with the reclusive Bowles, who speaks with a mixture of candor and secrecy, about his work and controversial private life, are intercut with the conflicting views of his critics and supporters. Highlights of the film include exclusive footage of the last meeting of Bowles, William Burroughs (Naked Lunch) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl) in New York in 1995; a scene of Bowles translating Moroccan storyteller Mohammed Mrabet; the first and only film appearance of his wife Jane's lover Cherifa, who is rumored to have poisoned her to death; a look at Bowles's work as a composer; and readings of his mysterious and poetic work accompanied by striking, and apt, visuals.

Bowles was the quintessential iconoclast. He left the United States in the 1940s after building a career as an important modern composer, to immerse himself in the culture of North Africa. A writer's writer, his associations span the elite cultural circles of the last century. At twenty, he was an intimate of Gertrude Stein and Aaron Copland; at thirty the peer of Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal; at forty, literary godfather to Beat writers Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. (All of those artists were gay, lesbian, or bi, although the film identifies only a few as such.) His unorthodox marriage to novelist and playwright Jane Bowles - both were gay and had significant relationships with others throughout their 35-year marriage - is legendary. Together they formed the magnet which drew many writers and artists to the exotic freedoms of Morocco before its independence in 1956. After Jane's death in 1973, Bowles continued to be the destination for "pilgrimages" of a steady stream of international admirers, including filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Owsley Brown (his excellent documentary Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles, complements this film), who captured different aspects of Bowles in his final years.

Let It Come Down (the title borrowed from his second novel) is structured around Bowles's wide-ranging monologue shot over several days, primarily in 1996, with various voices breaking in to comment, dispute and to try to clarify. Chief among these is his long-time friend William Burroughs, who acts as the primary commentator on Bowles's version of his life. At one point, Burroughs wryly comments that Bowles's autobiography, Without Stopping, "should be called Without Telling... because he doesn't tell anything... Nothing about his sex life. Nothing... That's very New England."

As Jennifer Baichwal wrote in her essay on the film (included on the DVD), "He tells you only as much as you need to know and then lets you find the rest." Her association with Bowles dates back to her early twenties when she ran away to Morocco, drawn by his dark, hypnotic prose. Subsequent visits deepened their friendship. Her film is also a strikingly impressionistic vision of Morocco, as reflected in Bowles's writings. She and cinematographer Nick de Pencier capture breathtaking footage of his adopted country, from the twisted medinas of Tangier and Fez to the surreal beauty of the desert, which serve as visceral metaphors for Bowles's interior world. There is something absolutely right about pairing actor Tom McCamus's (The Sweet Hereafter) reading of a passage from Bowles's best-known novel, The Sheltering Sky, with an abstract desert landscape at night: The sky a deep cobalt blue, with just a thin stretch of shifting sand beneath.

Towards the end of the film, we begin to learn more about Bowles's gay identity, including his passionate affair - which one friends calls "the great love of his life" - with Ahmed Yacoubi, a Moroccan artist who had the endearing habit of playing his flute for 10 minutes to a just-finished painting "to blow life into it." It is a rare treat to see home movies of a much younger, and joyous, Bowles (from the 1950s) cavorting with Ahmed.

In addition to providing the outline of Bowles's life and works and showing us his world, the film shrewdly leaves much unsaid. It lets Bowles's body, face, and intonations reveal - especially in the fascinating unedited sequences included in the DVD's Special Features section - as much about the man as what he says. It never tries to pin Bowles down, which of course is impossible. Intead it allows this enigmatic artist to remain as elusive as his enduring works.