"Pavements," on Mubi: Alex Ross Perry creates a baroque labyrinth around the 1990s Californian group

MUBI – ON DEMAND – FILM

From a distance, Pavement (in Roman letters, singular) is a tiny object. An American rock band that achieved fame (but not glory) in the 1990s, whose members split up at the end of the last century, before reuniting periodically (in 2010 and 2022) as their audiences' purchasing power increased. Pavements (in italics, it's the title of a film, plural, we'll see why) considers Pavement – the human collective, the music, the work – from all angles, with a wealth of cinematic means that at first seems out of proportion.

To make it happen, Alex Ross Perry created an exhibition, "Pavements 1933-2022," and a musical, Slanted! Enchanted!, which opened on Broadway in late 2022. During rehearsals for Slanted! Enchanted!, the author of Her Smell (2018, with Elisabeth Moss) , one of the most beautiful rock fictions in cinema, explained to the New Yorker : "It's like taking the Todd Haynes film, the Scorsese documentary, the Pennebaker documentary, and even the Dylan film that everyone hates, Renaldo and Clara [1978] , and putting them in a food processor."

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