‘Beauty and pain’: the portrait of a powerful woman and impunity for an epidemic

While Laura Poitras has been very active in recent years, his latest feature film was ‘Risk’, a critical portrait of the figure of Julian Assange and which he has tried to boycott the film in multiple ways; their works were overshadowed by the success of the gorgeous and Oscar-winning ‘Citizenfour’a true spy thriller starring Edward Snowden. That was until now, when Poitras is back in a big way with ‘Beauty and Pain’new winner of the Golden Lion at the 79th Venice International Art Exhibition and nominated for an Oscar for best documentary.

‘Beauty and Pain’ has two aspects. On one side, is a political feature filmwhich denounces the total impunity that the Sackler family, owner of pharmaceutical companies, has had (and has) Purdue Pharma and Mundipharma and those who are among those responsible for the severe health crisis in the United States with the opioid epidemic that the country is suffering and that he took his own life more than 600,000 people in the last decade.

A scandal that Poitras denounces through the PAIN association (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), founded in 2017 by artist and photographer Nan Goldin, an employee of OxyContin after a medical operation and suffered an overdose of fentanyl (another of the drugs that caused this crisis) which almost led to his death. The director portrays Goldin’s strength as an activist, who personally faced her fight against the Sackler clanespecially when she is regarded as one of the essential storytellers of the New York counterculture scene of the 1970s and 1980s, an artistic icon who empowered her to publicly denounce how the Sacklers sought to silence any controversy through art donations to museums, exhibition theaters and even to the press through investments in advertising.

An essential feature film about art as a form of political dissidence

Poitras, from that aspect, show the power of activism with art, with small victories such as major art galleries such as the MET, the Louvre or the Guggenheim refusing donations from the Sackler family, even removing his surname from the exhibition halls in which he had helped pay for his silence. also shows how the strength of activism and the fact that various associations have come together have managed to mobilize the media and public opinion and it was achieved that Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy, as well as reaching an agreement with the victims and their families to give more than six billion dollars in an out-of-court settlement with which the family achieved full impunity.

This is “Beauty and Pain” on the one hand. For the other, is a personal feature film with which Poitras paints a portrait of Goldin’s life and careerwhich shows his childhood and how he experienced the drama of seeing how his parents put his sister Barbara in a psychiatric hospital, who ended up committing suicide when she was a teenager. It also explores other parts of her life such as drug use or something Goldin hadn’t talked about publicly, from her time as a prostitute. Also how the abusive relationship she experienced with one of her boyfriends led to a photo exhibition where Goldin showed off the bruises and other scars left by her former partner, an advanced form of artistic denunciation of sexist violence.

Added to this is the fact that Poitras, dividing the film into seven episodes, also narrates the Goldin’s artistic achievements, the execution of several slide scenes, such as Goldin’s 1985 exhibition titled “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”. Showing Goldin as an essential figure in the revival of the fight for LGBT rights, as well as the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and how it took an entire generation and how art and photography made it somehow remain part of that generation. Parallels are also shown of how drug companies did nothing to save those lives, how they waited nearly a decade to start making drugs that would stop HIV from being deadly, and how they have now created a good handful of employees from opioids.

A powerful documentary, in which we see a hand in hand work between Poitras and Goldin, which strikes a certain balance, being half denunciation cinema and half biographical documentary. An essential film to get to know a unique artist and an association that continues to fight against this epidemic which, in 2021, reached its record, taking 80,411 lives. Undoubtedly one of the feature films of the year.

Note: 8

The best: Goldin’s portrayal of life and work is fascinating.

Worse: By converging two aspects, they produce the sense that something is left unfinished in their complaint about opioids.