Under Great White Northern Lights

Occupying a plain somewhere between Johnny Ramone and Keith Richards, Jack White’s low-fidelity garage riffs rooted by Meg White’s primal, metronomic drums have become so familiar they are difficult to objectify. So in 2007, 10 years after emerging from Detroit, The White Stripes set out to play a series of impromptu, ‘constricted’ gigs in the vast, untapped frontier of northern Canada. There are moments here that capture a vast generational expanse in a world pressured by modernity; the young flinging themselves around, the old taciturn and disturbed. But documentarian Emmett Malloy is far more concerned with exposing the intimacies and insecurities at the heart of an enigmatic relationship. Jack is a pure extrovert. Meg, her burgeoning depression painfully apparent, smiles elusively and barely says a word. But paradoxically, the film is stronger for the fact that Malloy barely succeeds in revealing anything. Asked by Jack why she never says anything, she responds with honesty. “What can I say, I’m just quiet. You have nothing to do with it.”

Tom Seymour

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