Amazing Grace

In the first scene of this distinctly odd documentary, Grace Jones meets a group of fans, who squeal with delight at the sight of her and nearly pass out with excitement when they hear her speak. And that, I suspect, is the effect which the film confidently expects to have on the rest of us. OK, it seems to be saying, so you’re not going to learn how Jones got from the Jamaican childhood we see her revisiting to the globetrotting life we see her living now. OK, so there’s no structure, sometimes no clue as to where scenes are taking place or who the other people in them might be — and for quite a lot of the time she’s just pottering around not doing very much. But look! It’s Grace Jones!

In fact, about the only thing about Jones’s life to emerge with real clarity is how tough that Jamaican childhood was. When she was very young (although, characteristically, the film doesn’t tell us how young), her parents moved to America, leaving the children with their grandmother and her new husband, known as Mas P — a man who regularly and ferociously beat them for such crimes as watching TV, making them read aloud from the Bible as he did so. The rage this created, she tells relatives, continued into adult life: ‘I was playing out Mas P: that’s why I was so scary.’

Other scenes suggest that her scariness hasn’t entirely gone, now she’s approaching 70. (Several feature her shouting at length into various phones about how she isn’t ‘going to take this shit’.) But there are also moments of genuine warmth. Visiting Paris, she tells the father of her son that ‘you were the only man who made my knees buckle’, before holding their new grandchild with touching tenderness.