Sympathy for the Devil 1968

Composed as a mosaic of scenes that blend music, politics, and avant-garde cinema, the film threads its main narrative through a series of long, uninterrupted takes inside London’s Olympic Studios, where the Mick Jagger and his bandmates work through take after take of the track “Sympathy for the Devil.” The sequence isn’t just a music session; it acts as a sonic heartbeat for a film that dramatizes a year of upheaval. In parallel, the film marks the unraveling of Brian Jones, showing how personal tensions and artistic tensions collide as the cultural year 1968 convulses around them. A telling moment lands early on when a line about the assassination of John F. Kennedy appears to be altered to the plural after the killing of Robert F. Kennedy, signaling how history itself is being rewritten in the moment.

Interwoven with these studio scenes are stark, exterior images: rows of Black Panthers gathered in a junkyard of rusting cars, reading from revolutionary texts and passing rifles from hand to hand. The mood is both ritualistic and dangerous, a tableau of solidarity and menace that foregrounds the era’s political radicalism. In a disturbing counterpoint, a group of white women, dressed in white and seemingly abducted, are brutalized and then shot off-screen; their bodies are later shown in a sequence of tableaux, underscoring the film’s blunt confrontation with violence and its depiction of vulnerability.

A persistent voiceover delivers a stream of political reflections—Marxism, revolution, and other themes that interested the director—creating a documentary-like cadence that rides over the imagery. One of the recurring visual motifs involves a camera crew following a woman dressed in a yellow peasant gown, who becomes a living embodiment of democracy, a character named Eve Democracy. The first appearance of Eve Democracy is tied to Anne Wiazemsky, whose presence anchors the probing questions and binary responses that define the sequence.

The interior section sharpens the film’s contrasts: a pornographic bookstore filled with a jumbled mix of comics, magazines, and Nazi pamphlets. Patrons move through the shelves, exchange money for sheets, and—one by one—slap two Maoist hostages who sit nearby as part of the provocatively staged display. The store’s unsettling atmosphere culminates with a child entering to buy material and participate in the same harsh ritual, while the proprietor reads aloud from Mein Kampf. The bookstore becomes a compact, enclosed microcosm of the film’s wider concerns: commodification, propaganda, and violence.

At moments, the film returns to the broader, quasi-documentary approach that punctuated its opening: Eve Democracy’s portraiture echoes in later, lingering shots as the camera’s gaze drifts toward the coast. The final sequence revisits the beach and a towering camera crane, where another woman in white lies on the edge of the setup, mounted on the crane’s platform. Instead of rising, she remains motionless, suspended above the sand, while a companion and a large motion picture camera frame the moment from a distance. The sense of watching a movie within a movie—and of being observed while watching—permeates this ending.

As the film’s images pulse with political rhetoric, pop culture, and performative violence, it rewards patient viewing with a dense, multi-layered texture. The cast threads through the tapestry in both visible and off-screen forms: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts appear as themselves, while other actors contribute to the fabric in more enigmatic roles. The film also foregrounds performers such as Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull in backing capacities, and includes on-screen presence from Nicky Hopkins at the piano/organ, whose contributions underscore the musical spine of the work. The world on screen is populated by a rich cast that includes Anne Wiazemsky as Eve Democracy, with additional appearances by figures such as Glenna Forster-Jones and Françoise Pascal among others, each adding texture to the film’s sprawling tableau.

The result is a provocative meditation on revolution, art, and media—an invitation to consider how sound, spectacle, and ideology intertwine. The film’s most memorable moments—its studio rehearsals, its black-power rally imagery, its voyeuristic bookstore sequence, and its final, unobtrusive beach tableau—cohere into a singular, unsettling meditation on power, spectacle, and the politics of perception.

What are they doing over there?

I think they’re shooting a movie

• The production’s ambition is matched by its willingness to provoke, challenge, and linger on uncomfortable truths about cultural upheaval and the forces that shape it. The result is not a conventional narrative but aConcetta of scenes that demand attentive, reflective viewing, rewarding viewers with a dense, thought-provoking portrait of a world in disruption.