At the dawn of the 2010s, English bookmakers were cynically betting on who, Amy Winehouse or Peter Doherty, would succumb first to the excesses of drug addiction. If the London soul singer lost this tragic race, on July 23, 2011, at the age of 27, her friend and fellow rocker survived the self-destructive spiral that accompanied her frenzied beginnings within the Libertines or the Babyshambles.
This chaotic journey, rich in artistic flashes and escapades, this fight ultimately won against the demons of addiction, are at the heart of the documentary Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin, directed by Katia de Vidas and broadcast on Canal Docs, Monday January 19.
If Amy, the film that Asif Kapadia dedicated to Amy Winehouse in 2015, featured a multitude of testimonies, this 90 minutes by the filmmaker, musician and now Doherty’s companion, Katia de Vidas, was built mainly from the 200 hours of rush collected by her alongside the rocker, over almost ten years of filming.
At the initiative of Christian Fevret, co-founder of the magazine Les Inrockuptibles, who convinced the singer to let himself be filmed, the woman who was then a film student began to follow the dilapidated cherub in 2004.
At the time, his first group, the Libertines, imploded, after having ignited the British scene with two albums – Up The Bracket (2002), The Libertines (2004) – reviving the island rock panache. Punk furia and melodic intuition, ruffled anthems and emotional delicacy, are accompanied from the start by excesses which delight the news sections of the tabloids.
Turmoil, backstage, silence
The on-board camera first captures Doherty and his new group, the Babyshambles, in the middle of this turmoil, in the erratic atmosphere of concerts, rehearsals or attempted recordings. Then in the intimacy of backstage and sleepless nights, in the newfound silence of rooms or houses in infinite disorder.
Speech and anxieties are freed. The icon of the return of “sex, drugs and rock” confides in his childhood, his life as the son of a soldier, tossed from barracks to barracks, marked by these barbed wire partitions and paternal discipline. In response, he built an imagination nourished by rock, poetry and literature. An ideal of Rimbaldian bohemianism, in search of absolute freedom and alteration of the senses.
The increasing proximity of the camera is also confronted with the trashy reality of syringes and shooting sessions. The mischievous face of this romantic figure, who formed a destroyed couple with the top model Kate Moss, is extinguished in lost glances, tottering in the nudity of his frail body “a stranger in his own skin”. He comes close to a fate like Sid Vicious (1957-1979) or Kurt Cobain (1967-1994), tries to fight against his addictions, and confronts the violence of prison life.
Cracks and endearing frankness
Immodest, sometimes to the point of complacency, the film also captures the humor, the cracks and the endearing frankness of an artist aware of his demons. Beyond the Libertines classics (What a Waster, Don’t Look Back Into the Sun…), the soundtrack captures a voice and a pen inhabited by moments of grace, even if we ultimately witness few real moments of creation.
Over time, we feel the director’s gaze soften into a loving gaze, at the risk of losing the distance necessary for the documentary purpose. The material collected is no less rare in the filmed history of pop. Until this final cure in Thailand (the chronicle of which drags on), which will ultimately be the right one.
The musician and the filmmaker, who have become a couple, move to the edge of the cliffs of Etretat, in France, for a more peaceful, but nonetheless productive life. As recently proven by an excellent album by Doherty, The Fantasy Life of Poetry and Crime (2022), produced in duo with the Frenchman Frédéric Lo; an autobiography, written with Simon Spence, A Likely Lad, just translated into French (Un Garçon charming, 476 pages, €22.50, Le Cherche-Midi) and a reformation tour of the Libertines, which will pass through Paris on the 29 February, at the Les Inrocks festival. Before the band releases a new album, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, on March 29.
