"I was bursting with love for Anita,” Keith Richards recalls wistfully on the audio track to Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill’s highly engaging documentary portrait of Anita Pallenberg, the fast-living German-Italian beauty who became the blueprint for every bohemian rock-star muse to follow. Full of previously unseen material, including extensive private video footage from the Richards family archive, Catching Fire is a rare insight behind the scenes of the Rolling Stones at their debauched peak. It paints Pallenberg as an integral member of the band’s creative chemistry, amplifying their aristocratic glamour and satanic majesty. But the filmmakers also want to reclaim and re-frame Pallenberg from male-dominated rock mythology – not just a background figure in a junkie soap opera, but a smart, charismatic, influential counterculture figure in her own right.
Alongside audio interviews with Richards, Marianne Faithfull and others, Scarlett Johansson plays Pallenberg effectively, narrating extracts from her unpublished memoir. These juicy first-hand insights are a major selling point, and Johansson is a
