To pigeonhole Florian Habicht’s Rubbings From A Live Man as a documentary does it a disservice, encouraging preconceptions of an objective film based around clearly demonstrated facts. Instead, it is a kaleidoscopic blend of doco and the unashamedly dramatic that re-imagines the life of noted local thespian Warwick Broadhead, performing on camera for the first time. His unique life is given a fittingly unconventional onscreen form, one that depending on your cinematic persuasions you will find either poetic or pretentious.
Broadhead’s story extends from rural New Zealand to hippy San Francisco. Key moments are re-enacted through a string of symbolic theatre performances featuring him as the central performer, playing everyone from himself to God, that run the gamut from kitschy to surreal. Not all of these are entirely successful but the best are genuinely profound moments. It’s an esoteric, potentially artificial approach given real heart by Broadhead who publicly bares his soul and relives his greatest pains, ultimately seeming to achieve a level of catharsis. His performances are so deeply impassioned that you feel it is only through them that he can truly tell his story.
However, the film never lets you forget this – that he is an actor performing in front of a camera. Whilst Broadhead re-imagines his life as dramatic spectacles, Habicht strips way the documentary process to its nuts and bolts. The self-aware inclusion of rehearsals and crew members works like behind the scenes footage and reminds you that both the film and the story it tells are creative constructs rather than absolute truths. This creates an absorbing dynamic between Broadhead and the audience, whereby you are drawn in and empathise with him, yet at the same time stay at arms length trying to decipher the film’s more cryptic elements.
A film as experimental as this is not meant to appeal to everybody. Rubbings From A Live Man is a conceptually bold yet genuinely moving feast for the artistically inclined mind.
