‘Cameron Winter At Carnegie Hall’ Review: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Concert Movie Captures The Grandeur And Intimacy Of An Esoteric Event – London Film Festival

Every auteur’s favorite side hustle is the music video, and Paul Thomas Anderson is no exception. But where the likes of Martin Scorsese like to go bigger when they make a full-blown concert movie, PTA runs in the opposite direction. Jonathan Demme is a big influence here, inevitably, but Cameron Winter At Carnegie Hall doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to the latter’s 1984 Talking Heads doc Stop Making Sense. What it does look like is his extraordinary 1985 promo for New Order’s The Perfect Kiss, perhaps the only reason one would ever mention Powell and Pressburger and MTV in the same breath.

Though Winter’s esoteric music is an acquired taste, PTA’s film — working in partnership with Benny Safdie — offers a tremendous sense of occasion. Carnegie Hall seats well over 3,000 people, but this intense performance film gives life to the old saying about feeling alone in a crowd. Using warm 35mm color stock to capture the old-fashioned, almost music-hall ambience of the venue, Cameron Winter At Carnegie Hall makes both the grandeur and the intimacy of the event; in stark contrast to the raucous crowd scenes of, say, the recent Oasis movie, PTA captures the audience as both a blurry mass and a sequence of highly focused individuals, each experiencing their own kind of communion with a musician who doesn’t speak to them or even turn to face them.

Winter, 24-year-old frontman with a New York rock band called Geese, is a self-confessed admirer of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, which is abundantly clear from the outset. With the odd nod to the fire and brimstone of Nick Cave at his most religious, the show is simply one man and a grand piano, which somehow came as a shock to a woman sitting three rows from the front at its second screening at the London Film Festival (she left after the second song had barely begun). The stark simplicity of the sound, given the sprawling, almost classical nature of the songs, sometimes make the film surprisingly hard to follow — are we watching a full set or just one long song cycle? — and if it weren’t for the informed applause of an audience in the know, it would be hard to tell where one song ends and the next one starts.

Like its subject matter, PTA doesn’t really seem to care whether you’re enjoying yourself; much like Winter’s lyrics — which contain humdingers like “Names are donuts on the sea” — so much of Cameron Winter At Carnegie Hall is about interpretation. The camera is always finding ways around the artist, sometimes examining him with the forensic disinterest of a doctor, the next close up and in his face like an adoring fan. Winter remains slippery and impervious throughout, and when he makes his one and only act of showmanship — pretending to leave the stage after 30 minutes — it’s hard to know whether this is a joke or then start of a panic attack that has thankfully subsided.

The show and encore, which take up a little over an hour, are bookended by scenes of concertgoers filling the room and then emptying it. What happens in between is an interesting interrogation of the highly personal nature of art, how it happens and the neurological ripple effect it causes in a roomful of like-minded people. But is it any good? If that’s your main criteria, Cameron Winter At Carnegie Hall is not for you.

Title: Cameron Winter At Carnegie Hall
Festival: London, New York
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Distributor: Mubi
Running time: 1 hr 11 mins