The most interesting thing about The Frames has always been their fans. Back in the mid-90s I knew quite a few people who would follow the band around, seeing them multiple times on any given tour. Though never a fan myself, I saw the band live a couple of times during that period and was taken with the camaraderie amongst the audience. The Frames: In the Deep Shade follows the band on their twentieth anniversary tour and inexplicably ignores the audience completely. Ironically, the resulting film will only be of interest to people who love their music.
Filmmaker Conor Masterson has made a film that is deliberately inaccessible to non-fans. There is no potted history of the band, no sense of how their career has evolved and no captions to identify the band members (only Oscar winner and lead singer Glen Hansard will have any recognition to non-fans). This is a strange decision and one which alienates the audience but then The Frames: In the Deep Shade feels like a film whose director has gotten lost in his own vision. Rather than trying to tell the story of a band and capture the significance of their considerable time together, we are given “arty” visuals that communicate nothing – a pony standing in a snowy field, a flock of birds against a grey sky.
The rather po-faced talking head interviews do little to ease this situation. The unidentified band members specialise in cliche and cod-philosophy; music as “a soft body exercise in the Eastern sense” anybody? A strong hand was needed to keep away from this kind of self-indulgence but Masterson isn’t interested in asking any difficult questions. There is a moment for example, where Hansard is clearly upset by a heckler who calls him famous. A good interviewer would have picked up on this – has Hansard’s success changed his relationship with the band and the fans? We’ll never know.
The concert footage may be nicely filmed on handheld but essentially, by the end of the film all we have learned is that the band all love each other and love the music. It’s hardly Don’t Look Back; one for the fans only.