Anita, Keith and the madness of the Rolling Stones

This absorbing documentary explores the action-packed life of model and actor Anita Pallenberg, and her seismic influence on the Stones, writes Paul Whitington

Catching Fire (Club, 110mins) ★★★★

Myths about Anita Pallenberg’s extraordinary story extend even to her place of birth. Throughout her life, she insisted she’d been born in Rome, a romantic entry point, but after her death in 2017, her son Marlon clarified that it may in fact have been Hamburg. And if that port city seems too grey and northern to have produced so exotic a flower, Anita would not let it or anything else deter her from her quest for adventure.

This film, made with the blessing of her son Marlon Richards, is based on an unpublished memoir found after Pallenberg’s death: telling extracts, read by Scarlett Johansson, are enhanced by an extraordinary cache of archive footage of Anita during her romantic encounters with various Rolling Stones. Through this sometimes compelling audio-visual combination, we get a real sense of the drug-fuelled madness that engulfed that band.

Born in Hamburg then, or possibly Rome, Anita would recall dodging Allied bombs as a toddler, and her time among German nuns at a Catholic convent in Italy. Her parents were intensely conservative: when Anita later became an actor, they were horrified. “They said that acting was for prostitutes, and that I had dirtied the Pallenberg name.” But of course that was only the start of it.

Destined to consort with greatness, she fled to New York at the age of 19, and before you know it was hanging out with Warhol and Ginsberg, cleaning brushes for Jasper Johns. Gaunt and striking, she started modelling.

It was in Munich, in 1965, that Anita first encountered the Rolling Stones. After a raucous gig, Anita made her way backstage and “noticed Brian Jones straight away — he was the most beautiful one in the group”. Beautiful perhaps, but also deeply troubled.

At first they were inseparable: “Everyone said we looked like twins,” she writes. Jones, though, had a drug problem, and acid made him volatile. Anita tried to accommodate him: “I started doing acid and I stopped modelling — you couldn’t do both.” He was violent towards her, and during a disastrous trip to Morocco, Anita transferred her affections to Keith Richards.

Richards and Anita would stay together for over a decade, and have three children, but heroin would be their undoing. Through the persuasion of Marlon Richards, no doubt — who is an executive producer on the film — we get to hear from Keith, who speaks with genuine fondness about Anita, and says “you know we’re talking about a one-off here”. He is modest, and wryly philosophical. “I never really understood quite what she saw in me,” he admits.

Though Marlon was born in 1969, narcotic interludes and the pressures of fame put paid to any notion of an ordinary domestic life. When they fled a drug bust in London and moved to a chateau on the Côtes d’Azur, the Stones invaded it to make an album.

Keith had to watch from the sidelines while Anita had a fling with his best friend Mick during the making of the film Performance. After escaping yet another potential drug conviction by moving to Switzerland, they made a real go of settling down, but drugs were still in the picture. Marlon and his sister Angela speak movingly about the chaos of their childhoods. “In three years,” Marlon recalls, “I think we moved home about 30 times.”

Keith and Anita were drifting apart, and in June of 1976, their 10-week-old son Tara died in his cot: a devastated Anita would always blame herself. And chaos followed her: when the couple separated and Anita moved to America, a 17-year-old neighbour shot himself dead in her bedroom.

In Catching Fire, we get a blow-by-blow of the tabloid headlines of Pallenberg’s life, but not enough room, perhaps, is given to her thwarted and promising acting career, her fashion sense, or the impressive way in which she got sober and resurrected her life. When she died in 2017, many obituaries described her using that odious word ‘muse’, but Anita Pallenberg was rather more than that.

In selected cinemas only from Friday, May 17

Destined to consort with greatness, she fled to New York at the age of 19, and before you know it was hanging out with Warhol and Ginsberg

Tiger Stripes (Club, 95mins) ★★★

If Brian De Palma’s Carrie thought she had it tough, she might try being brought up in rural Malaysia. Twelve-year-old Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) is a bit of a free spirit: in my favourite moment in Tiger Stripes, she gives it socks in a hilarious TikTok dance. She hangs out with her less daring friends Farah (Deena Ezral) and Mariam (Piqa), but gets in trouble at her strict Muslim school for trying on a bra in the toilets, and taking off her headscarf. She’s given a public dressing down by her teacher, and things get even worse when she gets home. “You bring shame on our family,” her mother says, while dragging her out into the street by her hair.

That night, Zaffan wakes in confusion to find blood in her bed: her period has begun. “You’re dirty now,” her mother tells her, echoing the wider societal mood. When her friends find out, they start to shun her, but Zaffan has noticed other changes in her body, a new power even, and may get her own back. Amanda Nell Eu’s debut feature is sharp and witty, justifiably angry, and while the supernatural inferences are somewhat half-hearted, her three young leads are wonderful.

In cinemas from Friday, May 17

Rome: Open City (No Cert, IFI, 101mins) ★★★★★

As Italy flirts with fascism, this timely restoration of a 1940s classic reminds us how well it went last time they tried it. Filmed only months after Rome had been liberated by the allies, Roberto Rossellini’s hard-hitting drama charts the struggles of those who resisted both the Nazis and Mussolini’s fascists in the dying days of World War II. Luigi Ferrari (Marcello Pagliero) is a prominent Communist resistance fighter, and the Gestapo are scouring Rome for him. Despite their ideological differences, he seeks the help of priest Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi).

Ferrari’s presence in Don Pietro’s working-class parish is dangerous for everyone, especially as his girlfriend Marina (Maria Michi) is a Gestapo spy. Rome: Open City is often called a neorealist film, but Rossellini used the heightened tropes of melodrama to draw us into his moving tale. He does not shirk from the reality of torture, and in one beautiful scene Don Pietro sees in the badly beaten Ferrari a vision of Christ. Aldo Fabrizi is wonderful as the pragmatic priest, and the great Anna Magnani towers above all as the fearsome working class matriarch Pina. A masterpiece.

In cinemas from Friday, May 17