FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Julian Schnabel - Basquiat


I have the feeling that since the Corona quarantine there is wonderful weather every day! What do you do on a Good Friday like this? A walk followed by a movie - hold on tight! - David Bowie, Dennis Hopper, Willem Dafoe, Benicio del Toro, Christopher Walken, Gary Oldman and even Courtney Love!

No more participating in the world, forgetting the inner voice of reason, surrendering to painting... Jean-Michel Basquiat managed not to participate most of his life, to devote himself to painting. Basquiat is the debut of the painter Julian Schnabel and he understands him, also because Schnabel was a friend of Basquiat. Schnabel remembers that Basquiat was a taciturn man who often lost touch with a conversation. Basquiat was a dreamer. A lovable man, but also full of grief and anger. Mostly he preferred not to reveal this side to the world and preferred a mask: That of passivity. Basquiat, a middle-class child, became one of the most important artists during the early 1980s in New York's Soho district. His anonymous graffiti was already known in New York in the late 70s. Later, Basquiat admitted to standing behind the pseudonym SAMO that many admired in New York. Basquiat painted everything, furniture, objects, even his girlfriend's pictures. When Andy Warhol and a well-known collector bought his postcards for the first time, his career began. In the film, Warhol and the Collector are played by David Bowie and Dennis Hopper. Basquiat (Jeffrey Wright, whose game is as opaque as the artist himself) lived for some time as a homeless person and for a while in a cardboard box. Sneaking out of his middle-class home, he slipped into his own world. Even for his girlfriend Gina (Claire Forlani) Basquiat remained a mystery. Like all drug addicts he was mainly concerned with himself and his emotional world. In the New York art world he quickly became a star (as we can see from the works of art in Schnabel's film, we can easily understand why people liked his works so much). The art dealer Rene Ricard (Michael Wincott) promised Basquiat at a party to make him a star. Basquiat made friends with Andy Warhol (who is played so strikingly by David Bowie that I often thought Bowie was Warhol!). Drugs were part of Basquiat's essence and Warhol was one of the few to understand that. His best old-time friend Benny (Benicio Del Toro), on the other hand, dropped Basquiat because of his self-destructive instincts. It was quite obvious to everyone that Basquiat was in trouble, but also that he was finally living in his own world. Julian Schnabel is an intimate connoisseur of the New York art world (we see his own works, which in the film are assigned to an artist played by Gary Oldman). Through the cast of Dennis Hopper and Bowie, the film level and reality seem to overlap. Schnabel also has a fine ear for Basquiat's misconduct: Basquiat will prove that there is not a single black painter worth mentioning. Basquiat was an artist, he was wrong in his judgment and logical thinking. His madness grew steadily; in the end he wore wooden shoes with the inscription "Titanic". On 12.8.1988 he died.