Faith amidst alcoholism

The film industry has pinned its hopes on No Time to Die as the saviour of local cinemas who have struggled to survive months without audience revenue. But if you want to feed your soul, rather than your adrenal gland, then the Aretha Franklin musical biopic Respect, is the movie to see.

RESPECT 
Director: Liesl Tommy
Certificate 12A, Run time 144 minutes

The film covers 20 years of Aretha’s life, beginning in 1952 with a ten-year-old Aretha (played by Skye Dakota Turner) being woken from bed by her father, the Revd C.L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker), to sing for the guests at his booze-fuelled late-night party. After nodding hello to ‘Auntie Ella’ (Fitzgerald), ‘Uncle Louis’ (Armstrong), ‘Uncle Sam’ (Cooke) and ‘Auntie Dinah’ (Washington), the young Aretha captivates these aristocrats of the jazz world with her precocious performance, her daddy looking on with glowing pride at his favourite child. The movie finishes in 1972 with a 30-year-old Aretha just managing to hold it all together as she goes back to her roots and records a live version of ‘Amazing Grace’ at a packed-out New Temple Baptist Church in Los Angeles. In-between is a story of a girl robbed of her childhood by sexual assault, teenage pregnancy, the death of her mother and an over-controlling father; of a black artist finding her voice in a society divided by racism and segregation; of a young wife suffering abuse at the hands of a possessive and violent husband; and a performer who descends into the abyss of alcoholism to try to keep away the ‘demons’ of her past. Respect doesn’t shy away from the brokenness of the world, nor the contradictions of the church, yet I left the cinema feeling that my soul had been fed, not only through the sheer joy of Aretha’s music, but also by the deep Christian faith that permeated her life just as it does this film.