At the beginning of director Lee Daniels' film "The United States vs Billie Holiday" American jazz singing legend (Golden Globe winner and Academy Award nominee Andra Day) is being interviewed by Reginald Lord Devine (Leslie Jordan).
The radio journalist mentions her song "Strange Fruit" and calls her "troublemaker" for keeping on singing it, but she replies "You ever seen a lynching?" adding about the song "It's about human rights. Government forgets that sometimes."
This week "Strange Fruit" came to mind to many after the verdict for the murder of George Floyd was finally released. Floyd, 46, died last year in Minneapolis after a white officer, Derek Chauvin, handcuffed him, then kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. A video recorded by a bystander asking to let him go, showed the horrific ordeal, with the officer kneeling on Floyd's neck while the man cried out, "I can't breathe".
On Tuesday Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd. Yet, while the guilty verdict was being announced, news also arrived about police officers who, while responding to an attempted stabbing, fatally shot Ma'Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old Black girl in Columbus, Ohio.
Earlier on in April, Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, was fatally shot at close range by police officer Kimberly Potter during a traffic stop and attempted arrest for an outstanding arrest warrant. They are just some of the latest victims of police brutality, so while the George Floyd verdict gave hope, it is clear that far more work must be done in the US to tackle systemic racism and police brutality. At the same time the verdict shook people's conscience, just like "Strange Fruit".
"Southern trees / Bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves / And blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees," Andra Day sings as Billie Holiday in one scene of Daniels' film and, while watching it, you feel compelled to rediscover its origins.
Holiday recorded this song about the horrors of lynching on 20th April 1939, but it was originally a poem - "Bitter Fruit" - by Jewish school teacher and civil rights activist Abel Meeropol. The poem was inspired by Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana.
Holiday remembers performing the song for the first time at New York's Café Society in her autobiography "Lady Sings The Blues": "The first time I sang it I thought it was a mistake. There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping."
From then on, everytime she performed the song, Holiday forced with her dramatic interpretation people in the audience to actually confront reality, racism and the horrors of lynching. The song caused a wide range of reactions: it reduced people to tears, but it was also blacklisted by radios, while Columbia Records refused to record it.
In Daniels' film (with a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks, the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama), we are not told about the origins of "Strange Fruit", but we are shown the consequences that keeping on singing it had for Billie Holiday.
Considered a troublemaker and a threat as she may have encouraged a black uprising by refusing to stop singing the controversial "Straneg Fruit", Holiday became the target of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The war to silence her was redressed as a war on drugs by agent Harry J. Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund). Undercover Black agent Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes) employed by Anslinger to infiltrate jazz clubs, eventually framed Holiday, who was a known heroin user.
Arrested for narcotics possession in 1947 and sentenced to West Virginia's Alderson Federal Prison Camp, after she was released Holiday wasn't given back her cabaret card, required to all New York City performers in nightclub.
Daniels suggests that Fletcher regretted framing her and fell in love with Holiday, rescuing her from a life of abuses. While the romance is actually historically incorrect, the film has some powerful moments, like Andra Day singing in a deep mournful voice "Strange Fruit" with the camera lingering on her face, on her haunting and anguished eyes and on her cherry red lips evoking blood and contrasting with the immaculate white flower behind her left ear. It's a powerful, painful and moving moment.
Costumes, designed by Paolo Nieddu in collaboration with Prada, have a great part in this film. Nieddu created collages in the costumes for "The United States Vs Billie Holiday": while he took inspiration from vintage photographs of Billie Holiday, he also selected elements and details from Prada's archives and recombined them together. Miuccia Prada loves silhouettes from the '40s and the '50s, so Nieddu found great correspondences between original clothes and Prada's interpretations.
We first meet Holiday as she sings "All of Me" in a luminous and striking red gown, inspired by a lapel-halter style dress Holiday donned onstage at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1954, recombined with a Prada look from its A/W 2004 collection for what regards the molded bodice and bust, while the colour for the gown was taken from a Spring/Summer 2009 dress.
The black and white gown was instead a reinvented version of a dress in the same shades and with an oversized bow Holiday donned in 1947 at the Downbeat Club. In this case, though, the bustline was recreated from Prada's car inspired collection (Spring/Summer 2012) and the dress was remade in black taffeta and decorated with floral embroidery.
Andra Day then wears a replica of the pinstripe skirt suit Holiday opted for when she appeared in court: Nieddu based it on a vintage suit jacket and separate skirt but made it with Loro Piana's cashmere wool and silk crepe.
After serving her time in prison, Holiday sings in front of a sold-out crowd at Carnegie Hall in a black silk gown with dramatic shoulders.
The statuesque gown in the film was made in collaboration with Old Hollywood dressmaker and Orry-Kelly tailor John Hayles (who also designed for Marilyn Monroe).
For her illicit residency at Club Ebony, we see instead Andra Day/Billie in a classic yellow marigold gown with precious crystal work, inspired from a 1946 look with shoulder details from Prada's A/W 2017 collection (see image 8 in this post) recombined with the crystal patterns from the house's Resort 2011 collection (here reinterpreted by costume designer and artist Maria Hooper).
We also see Andra Day/Billie in a red flutter-sleeve crop top (based on a vintage 1930s design) and matching wide leg pants for a performance in Baltimore.
While travelling with her band, Andra Day/Billie wears a vivid summery dress with multi-coloured flower embroideries forming long fringes. We see her walking through tall grass during a break but, while following a path she finds herself in front of a rural house, the set of a lynching and the colours of her joyful dress are juxtaposed to this harrowing scene.
Holiday actually never witnessed a lynching, but here the shocking scene evokes the graphic depiction of the metaphor behind "Strange Fruit" and eventually prompts her to defy the authorities and sing the song again. She does so in a strapless white gown with crystal embroidery on the bodice.
Inspired by Holiday's look at her last major jazz concert at Town Hall in 1958 (View this photo), Nieddu's version features the plunging neckline from a Prada Spring/Summer 2014 dress (last image in this post) and geometric beading and crystal-work.
Costume-wise there were a couple of pitfalls: the credits scene with Andra Day and Trevante Rhodes waltzing and Day rebuking him for stepping on her "Prada dress" was pure advertising and may have been cut, while Prada's triangular logo may have been removed from the pants Billie Holiday wears while on tour, as this product placement wasn't necessary at all.
The costumes have a specific purpose in the film - reminding us that Holiday was a talent, but that she also looked astonishing. Her iconic presence, her gowns, furs and diamanté sunglasses, simply oozed glamour, while hiding her pains, the traumas of her upbringing of violence, rape and abuses.
Her clothes and accessories (Nieddu accessorized all of the costumes with vintage finds, from handbags to charm bracelets and cat-eye sunglasses) were her armour: her style oozed strength and her grand gowns were her protection as she sang her revolutionary song.
Her looks were therefore weapons of resistance and political statements at the same time and this is exactly what mainstream white society couldn't stand: in the film when Billie Holiday sings at Carnegie Hall, Anslinger's wife is mesmerised and she states "She does look incredible", while her husband remains silent, but inside he's probably disdainfully wondering "how can a Black woman dare to look as glamorous?"
People like Anslinger may have thought justice was done when Billie Holiday died in 1959 handcuffed to a hospital bed as agents, claiming they had found heroin on her, arrested her as she lay dying. She was 44.
Her legacy lived and "Strange Fruit" became one of the protest songs of the 20th Century, an anthem for the civil rights movement.
Covered by many different artists, including Andra Day who recorded her own version of "Strange Fruit" in 2017 in partnership with not-for-profit organisation Equal Justice Initiative, it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978 and was named the song of the century by Time Magazine in 1999. Incidentally, the movie was released on the exact day the US House of Representatives passed the Emmett Till (14-year-old Till was lynched in Mississippi in 1955) anti-lynching act - 26th February 2021.
Lee Daniels' movie doesn't always work, mainly for its unlikely romance between the singer and Jimmy Fletcher. The agent actually told Holiday's biographer Linda Kuehl he regretted the betrayal, but there is no evidence that he hang around or that he had a love affair with Billie Holiday.
Yet this is not first biopic that contains made-up facts, and Andra Day's brilliant performance as Billie Holiday offers compensation reminding us that it's not just the powerful lyrics of "Strange Fruit" that are important, but the fact that Holiday refused to stop singing the song throughout her career.
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