“For me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema,” said Ingmar Bergman, and his declaration feels like a missive from another time now that popular movies are no longer about human beings. Now, what we used to call the movies gives us the human face covered in make-up and latex masks; the names of the actors behind all that gunk don’t even appear in the trailers or print ads for the films they’re in.
There were plenty of harbingers of this state of affairs and one of them was the middling box-office performance of the 1993 Tina Turner biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It.
When it came out, Tina (it’s impossible to call her by her last name) was almost ten years into a comeback that made her a bigger star than she had ever been. If you were lucky enough to see one of her shows at the time you saw a performer so adept at connecting with audiences, even in huge venues, that she had no need of resorting to arena-rock posturing. After years of abuse and industry indifference, Tina was clearly ecstatic to be performing again, and those of us in the audience knew just how lucky we were that she had fought all the crap thrown at her. We reaped the glorious benefits, but she didn’t do it for us.
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