'MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A.' review

M.I.A.'s reaction to her documentary, after she watched it for the first time, as it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2018, was ambivalent. She commented on how director and longtime friend Steve Loveridge:

'took all of my cool out...he took all the shows where I look good and tossed it in the bin. Eventually, if you squash all the music together from the film, it makes for about four minutes'. 

I kind of disagree with this, though. I think that M.I.A. comes across as effortlessly cool. And yes, as far as a rapper's biopic goes the film is lacking in glamourised music video footage and concert scenes. But something of the textured vortex of eclectic sounds that is M.I.A.'s music is also captured in the way in which the film is largely composite of lots of different home video clips. The film is made beautifully raw by not disproportionately focussing on the polished moments that make up the apex of M.I.A.'s career. There are only brief mentions of some of her accolades - an Oscar and grammy nomination both in 2009 and Rolling Stone's album of the year in 2007. As the film's title betrays, its focus is personal and is laid foremost on Mathangi or Maya, as she's known to friends and family, before even approaching the music of M.I.A. The film spans twenty two years from M.I.A.'s teenage years in the nineties until the present day. Though to help us to understand M.I.A., Loveridge's film concentres on M.I.A.'s formative years and early career, the first half of the film extends as far as the composition of M.I.A.'s first two albums Arular (2005) and Kala (2007). Running through the documentary as a whole and intrinsic to M.I.A. as a person, Loveridge shows, is her urgent need for self-expression, and this is common to M.I.A.'s utilisation of the mediums of film, art and music. The film starts with M.I.A. explaining how to get a video camera to focus, stressing how she carefully ensures the efficacy of her communication in this instance.

Going back to those first two albums, the title Arular pays homage to the nom de guerre of M.I.A.'s estranged father. The album's thematic base are her father's revolutionary ideals, as as one of the founders of the Tamil resistance movement in the Sri Lankan Civil war. Kala is named after M.I.A.'s seamstress mother, and her mother's struggles constitute a major theme of the recording. What's noticeable in the documentary are the outworkings of Arular and Kala in M.I.A.'s own life. M.I.A. conceptualises herself as a seamstress like her mother, stitching together the narrative of her life story. She remarks late on in the film how 'it’s amazing that in one lifetime you have to come and figure out so many things but I’ve made it all fit together', as if she has arranged and then sewn fabric pieces. She elliptically describes the incredible life she has constructed, 'a first-generation person..lived through a war, came as a refugee is now a pop star'. She and her siblings cut and snip her father's later work as a humanitarian and decide to present him primarily as a terrorist in their account. She salvages the fact that her father was absent and patches it into the rest of her story by recognising that it has at least given her and her siblings an 'interesting background'. M.I.A.'s voiceover when it appears draws attention to her very act of self-mythologising. A stolen radio is imbued with foundational significance to M.I.A.'s story as it means that without her normal radio music to fall asleep to, she catches her very first waft of hip hop in the nighttime London air. She observes how being shot at in Sri Lanka was continued in a sense for her being subject to racial slurs in London. And how the 'biggest contradiction' inhered in her life in 2009, being a mother and an award-winning musician, was overshadowed by her growing success being accompanied with Sri Lanka's increasing desperation.

M.I.A. resembles Arular in the way in which she is gravitated to the politics of marginalisation. This is established early on in the documentary when M.I.A. is a teen and she and her siblings have the BBC Nine O'Clock News on in the background and, spurning this portrayal of current affairs, M.I.A. is reading Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, a study of colonial mentalities in the western world. M.I.A.'s close interest in the state of Sri Lanka is presented in contrast to her brother's apathy. At 25, she makes a return in the documentary away from her 'superficial' life in 'the land of the Spice Girls' back to Sri Lanka. She anticipates beforehand how the trip will serve as an occasion, as a seamstress perhaps, to 'put all the pieces together' and 'show' her 'story' in its total as a fabric. The trip recurs throughout the film, I think partly to show how instrumental it was in M.I.A.'s development as a person and artist, after all she mentions having absorbed everything she's heard as she prepares to return from the trip. I also think the trip reappears as a rebuff to the assumption that M.I.A.'s elite lifestyle makes her a champagne socialist, demonstrating instead that she is a credible spokesperson for refugees. A male cousin of M.I.A.'s points out how M.I.A.'s voice is inexperienced as she only spent ten years in Sri Lanka before her mother whisked her and her siblings off to a council estate in Mitcham, south London. There are informative experiences from M.I.A.'s months spent revisiting Sri Lanka, from her being on a bus surrounded and provoked by armed soldiers, to sickening newspaper stories, to her Uncle arranging documentation in the event they be visited by police in the middle of the night. And in short, we're shown she has grounds to talk about such atrocities in the developing world as she describes as 'blown-up babies' because of this tie she has to her nearly 'blown-up' Sri Lankan grandma. M.I.A. reveals that it is hardly as though her gilded position makes her invulnerable, either, being subject to what she calls 'censorship' (i.e. the removal of her 'Born Free' video on youtube) and a $16.6 million NFL lawsuit, which she ultimately interprets as a form of revenge against a defiant 'brown person standing up'.

As the self-described 'only Tamil in western media' M.I.A. feels the onus to politicise her celebrity status and leverage international intervention on behalf of the refugee story. The documentary is enveloped by M.I.A. directing the filming of the video for her song 'Borders', which revolves around refugees, stressing her perennial commitment to reaching back to the genesis of her stitched narrative arc, highlighting those marginalised communities.

With thanks to https://mixmag.net/ for the image.