Shocking yet triumphant: Tina’s farewell gift
Tina No cert, 118 min
Dirs: Daniel Lindsay, TJ Martin. Cast: Tina Turner, Angela Bassett, Erwin Bach, Oprah Winfrey, Kurt Loder
‘It wasn’t a good life. The good did not balance the bad,” says Tina Turner, looking back on her extraordinary career. At 81, she makes it clear that Tina, a powerful new documentary that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival yesterday, is a farewell gift to fans before she returns to her retirement in her homes in Switzerland and France.
Turner admits that she still finds it painful to think about her dramatic past, in which she endured physical, psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of her first husband, Ike.
“The trauma is so deep that to go back there makes you feel that you are actually going back,” she says, describing a condition that her second and current husband, Erwin Bach, specifically links to posttraumatic stress disorder.
Tina Turner’s story is, ultimately, a survivor’s tale. If this is indeed its last act, the documentary, directed by Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin, packs quite a punch.
Slickly produced, at times flashy and schmaltzy – as was, to be fair, Turner’s musical oeuvre – it none the less digs into one of the most shocking yet triumphant stories in rock history.
The facts of Turner’s life are well known from her 1986 autobiography
I, Tina, the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It and the recent award-winning musical Tina. Born in 1939 and growing up poor as Anna Mae Bullock on the cotton fields of Tennessee, she was abandoned by both parents, relying on the care of relatives until, aged 17, she impressed band leader Ike Turner with her singing.
Ike renamed her Tina and made her a star, but he also married her in 1962 to control her career, beat her, sexually abused her and effectively imprisoned her, before she made her escape in
Seeing Turner’s sweet contentment will leave you feeling tearful
1976. “Maybe it was a good thing that I met him – that I don’t know,” the older, wiser Tina ponders. “It hurts to have to remember those times.”
Such was Turner’s image of sensuality and primal power, it’s oddly disconcerting when she first sits down to face the cameras here. Her face is soft and puffy beneath a fringe of well-tended hair and she’s dressed demurely in a dark suit, looking every inch a sweet little old lady.
But as Lindsay and Martin intercut dynamic archive footage of the singer in her prime, it becomes a treat to return to her older self, full of hard-earned wisdom.
Turner’s tale boasts a second act that saw her rise to global, multimillionselling, stadium-playing superstardom in the 1980s; she was the only middleaged female star of her magnitude in a notoriously sexist business. Tina brings it all to life with fantastic footage and revealing interviews.
It includes shocking tape-recorded testimony from Turner’s 1981 interview with People magazine, in which she first revealed that she had been a victim of spousal abuse, describing her life with Ike as “torture”.
It includes a graphic account of how he would beat her with coat-hangers until there were huge welts, then rape her, and then “make me get right back on stage and say ‘Sing, you m-----f-----, ’cause you made me do it.’”
Tina could be viewed as a pioneer of the #Metoo movement, yet there are complications in grappling with such material that a two-hour documentary can barely scrape the surface of.
Ike is certainly depicted as the villain, yet it also briefly acknowledges the racism that stunted this musical pioneer’s career, while skirting over the fact that he continued to be respected in the music business, winning his fifth Grammy award in 2007, the year he died (bitter but unrepentant) at the age of 76.
Though we’re reminded of the talent and hard work that sustained Turner, her comeback is depicted as a journey of emotional recovery.
Practising Buddhism gave her the strength to face her demons, and eventually to find love with a mild-mannered German record executive 16 years her junior.
“My heart went ba-voom!” she delightedly recalls of meeting Bach in 1986. “It means that a soul has met.” After the tumultuous, violent, emotionally wracked depiction of Turner’s life, the old couple display a sweet contentment that might leave you with a tear in your eye.
Tina airs on March 28 on Sky Documentaries and Now TV and will also be available via altitude.film