Potent tribute to O’connor offers a heartening story of survival
Nothing Compares Cert TBC, 97 min
★★★★★
With timing that is either awful or impeccable, a documentary about controversial Irish singer Sinéad O’connor premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday. For obvious reasons, it does not touch on the latest tragedy to have engulfed O’connor’s turbulent life: the suicide in early January of her 17-year-old son, Shane. Yet such is the film’s tightly marshalled storytelling and sympathetic tone, even our knowledge of such a devastating loss to come does not defuse its power. Rather, it stands as an even more vital testament to the bravery and significance of this preternaturally gifted, much maligned and embattled artist.
Directed by Northern Irish filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson, Nothing Compares adopts quite a narrow focus on O’connor’s story, covering her Irish childhood followed by her explosive rise and fall as a global pop superstar between 1987 and 1993. Cleverly recontextualised archive footage helps establish the socio-political setting of Ireland before the economic boom of the 1990s, when there was little separation between Catholic church and state, and women and young people were particularly constrained by laws against contraception, abortion, divorce and homosexuality.
Filled with images of religious icons shot in gloomy colours and underpinned by the often darkly atmospheric tones of O’connor’s music, at times the film displays aesthetics akin to an arty horror movie. And, in truth, this in some ways is a horror movie. “My mother was a very violent woman,” the older O’connor notes. “She was physically, verbally, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally abusive.”
O’connor was sent to be raised by nuns in a cloistered order. It was also home to a Magdalene asylum, filled with women incarcerated for the “sin” of pregnancy out of wedlock, a scandal that would eventually explode in the 2000s amid other sexual abuse scandals that engulfed the Catholic church, with cover-ups reaching as far as the Vatican.
All of this provides context for the more joyful side of the documentary, in which we are shown a skinny young girl with an electrifying voice discovering “therapy” in music. O’connor seems sweetly innocent in early footage, yet there was always a steely resolve to speak and sing her own truth. The tears in the video of her 1990 world-conquering version of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U were shed for her mother, who died in a car accident in 1986, with the problems between them unresolved. “I never stopped crying for my mother,” notes O’connor.
The footage of O’connor ripping up her mother’s photograph of Pope John Paul II on American TV show Saturday Night Live in October 1992 still has a viscerally shocking impact. But the hectoring tone of condemnation from public and celebrities that followed seems horribly misjudged now.
Yet there would be vindication to come, as the Catholic church was forced to apologise for its transgressions and Ireland repealed anti-divorce, contraception and homosexuality laws. In choosing to follow this political narrative, Ferguson sidesteps many of the personal complications of O’connor’s chaotic life and struggles with mental health. Yet this moving, ultimately heartening film persuasively reframes O’connor as a heroic figure, a damaged soul who found redemption in art, and courageously hewed a singular path, calling to account her (and by implication multitudes of other women and children’s) persecutors in the face of pernicious misogyny, savage mockery and career-destroying criticism.