Movie Reviews : ‘Depeche Mode 101’ Fails to Hit Musical Potential

Depeche Mode is a fascinating pop group, and director D. A. Pennebaker can be an interesting musical documentarian, but their pairing proves to be a classic oil-and-water mismatch in “Depeche Mode 101” (playing Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays only at the AMC Century 14, and opening next weekend at the AMC Burbank and AMC Mainplace in Santa Ana).

The oil here is teen favorite Depeche Mode, an English synthesizer group that combines deep and unremittingly dark themes with slick, pre-programmed, ominously compelling dance music. The water is unslick, spontaneity-loving Pennebaker and his film collaborators, David Dawkins and Chris Hegedus, who never once attempt to delve below the service to peek at what substance might lie beneath. The result makes the band and its young followers look much, much sillier than they deserve.

Pennebaker’s documentary technique is usually to let the hand-held cameras roll and trust that something interesting will happen. When you’re filming a roving Bob Dylan at the peak of his powers, as Pennebaker did in “Don’t Look Back,” catching interesting things is a given. But figuring out what makes reticent Depeche Mode or its rabid following tick would take a bit more work--work that hasn’t even been attempted in this remarkably unrevealing product.

The grainy “101” intercuts between uneven but great-sounding concert footage, scenes of backstage banality with the band and its crew, and scenes of an even more banal crop of East Coast teens who have been hired to follow the tour out West on a bus, especially for the film. If the point was to deflate Depeche Mode’s godlike standing among its fans, or to portray those fans as uneducated, trendy twerps who have no idea what the music is all about, it’s been well accomplished here. But one suspects that there is no point, or point of view, to all this random cinema verite.

Depeche Mode is not yet a national superstar act, but in some cities, especially Los Angeles, where a Rose Bowl concert in June drew more than 60,000, Modemania resembles Beatlemania at its peak. Indeed, at a screening for radio contest-winners earlier this week, female screams rendered the first few minutes of the loudly projected film inaudible. A quick flash of singer David Gahan in his underwear almost brought down the house and led one girl to try to tear her hair out with one hand while involuntarily reaching toward the on-screen Gahan with the other. All that was missing was Ed Sullivan.

A few scant moments in “101” capture fans’ sexual/philosophic mania in something close to a meaningful context, like one extended, telling shot of a hysterical girl shouting along with the bitter lyrics of “Blasphemous Rumours”, which includes the chorus: “I think God’s got a sick sense of humor, and when I die, I expect to find Him laughing.” (Watching Gahan exhort the young crowd to sing and clap along with dour ditties like this, you may intuit that someone besides the Almighty has a sick sense of humor here.)

But Pennebaker, Dawkins and Hegedus query neither band nor followers about the content or appeal of the music. One former Pennebaker subject, Dylan, used to sing about a Mr. Jones who knew something was happening around him but didn’t quite know what it was; this time, Pennebaker seems to be that Mr. Jones. What a waste of a phenomenon.