Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg review – rockn’roll ‘muse’ in the spotlight

Documentary tells the melancholy story of the model and actor at the centre of the 60s music industry but also weirdly peripheral to it

Anita Pallenberg endured many things, including the condescension of being labelled “muse” to the Rolling Stones. She became the girlfriend of Brian Jones who abused her, married Keith Richards who neglected her and then co-starred in the movie Performance with Mick Jagger, who fell unrequitedly in love with her. Now this documentary tells Pallenberg’s strange, sad, melodramatic story, with Scarlett Johansson voicing Pallenberg’s memories from her unpublished autobiography entitled Black Magic, discovered in manuscript after her death in 2017.

Born to a wealthy, cultured German family in Rome, Pallenberg did a bit of modelling and was then discovered by director Volker Schlöndorff. After she played a few minor movie roles, including opposite Jane Fonda in Barbarella, Pallenberg was cast in another role by the Rolling Stones: the exciting but pointless real-life part of uber rock chick, putting her at the very centre of the 60s rock’n’roll scene but also weirdly peripheral to it. In the strangest way, she behaved as a kind of cipher for the Stones’ competitive sexual relationships with each other. She was considered ephemeral, disposable – and, indeed, heartlessly disposed of; she was pressured by Richards into giving up her work acting and modelling, exhausted by abuse, drugs and depression, and often left on her own while the Stones went off on their neverending money-machine tours.

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