While Roky’s journey from 13th Floor Elevators rock idol to recluse is the ostensible focus of the film, You’re Gonna Miss Me is not standard music doco fare. Closer to Capturing the Friedmans than ‘Behind the Music’, the film revolves around three dysfunctional Erickson family members’Roky, Sumner and Evelyn. Evelyn sees the film as a chance to tell her side of the story, and to prove for the record that she’s a good mother. Sumner, the youngest of five brothers, wants legal guardianship of Roky to ensure he gets medical help. Roky, oblivious, turns every radio and TV in the house up as loud as possible and goes to sleep.

As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that psychosis is only one way of retreating from the world. Evelyn lives in her own delusions, believing yoga can cure Roky’s schizophrenia. She even scrawls her life story in child-like crayon on cardboard sheets in her living room. It’s because of Evelyn that Roky goes unmedicated for so long’she uses ‘Frasier’s’ Crane brothers and their lack of spiritual life to justify her distrust of psychiatry.

Evelyn’s manipulations feed family tensions until a final intervention. Built up resentments come to the fore. Compiled from fly-on-the-wall footage, interviews, home movies and archival shots, You’re Gonna Miss Me is, more than anything, a portrait of decay. And watching Roky deteriorate, it becomes clear that sometimes, there really is something to leaving a good-looking corpse.

After a clumsy first five-minutes that includes a cringe-inducing slow motion recreation of the massacre, Passabe hits its straps and finds a more naturalistic pace. Scrupulous about ensuring all voices are heard, the film-makers interview victims, perpetrators, the village priest, tribal elders, ex-militia members and their families, and UN commissioners and lawyers. What emerges in the film is that everyone has a different view of the events that occurred on the night in 1999, of who was responsible for them, and how the spirits of the dead can be appeased and amends made between villages.

While the focus of the film is on the consequences of the massacre, it’s the incidental shots that give the film its richness and depth’the sun rising over lush countryside, children
playing up to the cameras, elders suggesting fart jokes to put visitors at ease, villagers thanking UN leaders for keeping them safe, women niggling and teasing their husbands
about domestic ineptitude, and men making the sign of the cross then ritually sacrificing pigs to the tribal gods.

The handheld camera and natural lighting make the film startlingly intimate, and while the film-makers do indulge in the occasional National Geographic-style shot, they try not to exploit the poverty and ethnicity of their subjects. Ultimately, the story tells itself’and while it’s a story with no conclusive end, it’s one well worth telling.

Unfortunately, most of its conceits fall flat. The clever-clever touches, such as having writer Marguerite Duras (a brilliant Josiane Balasko) occasionally address the camera, are distracting and don’t really add much to the story. They also interrupt the pace of the film, so that the kidnapping plot supposedly propelling the action just seems to drag.

It’s a pity, because the central set-up is a good one. Georges (Charles Berling) is given an ‘import-export’ job, and charged with writing a screenplay with Duras about decolonisation. The film will screen at a Third World summit in Cuba, presided over by Mehdi Ben Barka, Moroccan revolutionary and potential political leader. Ben Barka will be the historical advisor for the film, leading to his journeying to France with little security for a meeting with Georges. The job, for Georges, is supposed to end there’but, of course, it doesn’t.

Much could be mined from this premise, but I saw Ben Barka Get Killed never rises above the expected. On the upside, the cinematography is wonderful, with a colour palette straight from French films of the ’60s. There’s also the occasional burst of smart and witty dialogue, although the subtitling doesn’t always gives an accurate sense of the wordplay involved.

Ultimately, Ben Barka collapses under the weight of its own aspirations. Had it stuck to a less convoluted format, it might have been an enjoyable and sharply political romp. As it is, trying to follow the story is not really worth the effort.