Year: 2024

Runtime: 102 minutes

Directed by: Philipp Fussenegger, Judy Landkammer

Written by: Cordula Kablitz-Post, Schyda Vasseghi

By Sarah Manvel

The appeal of certain artists can always be boiled down to one certain thing. One Direction were nice boyfriends; Rihanna a charming club singer; Madonna a gritty club singer; The Rolling Stones were bad boyfriends. You get the idea. But to maintain a long-term career in the music industry you need one of two things in addition to your talent: either the ability to shift with the times, or one monster smash that will propel your career as long as people have ears. Peaches exploded into our consciousness in 2000 with a song that on this family-oriented website must be called “F— the Pain Away,” and based largely on that one song has been able to maintain a solid musical career ever since. This documentary is about the (Covid-belated) 20^th anniversary tour of the “The Teaches of Peaches” album of which that song is the star, but it’s not remotely about being what some might call a one-hit wonder. It’s more about how having that one deathless song will enable the people who need your work to find you, and vice versa. This is not the greatest musical documentary that’s ever been made, but it’s a joyous record of one artist at one moment in time, and that’s worth a very great deal. 

If you are looking to find out much about the person whose government name is Merrill Nisker you won’t find that here (in 2012 she was the subject of another documentary, “Peaches Does Herself,” unseen by me). Instead directors Philipp Fussenegger and Judy Landkammer are interested in both how the tour comes together, and made the unusual choice to splice together performances of the 2022 North American tour with footage of Peaches performing the same songs back in 2000 and 2001. Peaches’ pangender/genderqueer dancers and road crew, a global group recruited from Berlin – hence the world debut at the Berlinale – are interviewed somewhat, as are Feist and Shirley Manson, though this is no “Truth or Dare” (though what is). Instead the focus is on about showing how Peaches’ music and rollicking stage shows have allowed her admirers to explore certain parts of themselves, whether that’s their bodies or their sexuality.

Because, as the entire documentary makes abundantly clear, Peaches’ one certain thing is disgust. Her frankness about the body and its bodily functions, which you might see in performance art, is unusual in mainstream pop. Not waxing pubic hair before being photographed in a leotard? Taking press interviews from the bath? Being willing to go barebreasted (except for pasties) onstage in her mid-fifties? Who does that? But Peaches’ bold stage presence, which includes dancers cheerfully and acrobatically nude, or wearing costumes made out of human hair, is a gleeful reminder that we all have bodies. Sometimes those bodies are disgusting, as are the things we do with those bodies, but those same things are also our greatest sources of pleasure. So learning to lean into that disgust is also learning to accept pleasure, and once you do that – well, then you can sing the chorus of her biggest song. 

The show’s grand finale, as the movie’s, is a montage of those performances from that tour – I especially liked how the show in New Orleans obviously included someone on the tuba – which all included someone from the crowd being pulled up to sing that last chorus. And while the lithesome dancers cavorted onstage in some very adult situations (ahem), the true focus is on the body on the audience member in the middle of this, screaming their little hearts out. It’s incredibly cathartic.