Billie Holiday, une affaire d'État
Original title: The United States vs. Billie Holiday
IMDb RATING
6.3/10
15K
YOUR RATING
Follows Holiday during her career as she is targeted by the Federal Department of Narcotics with an undercover sting operation led by black Federal Agent Jimmy Fletcher, with whom she has a ... Read allFollows Holiday during her career as she is targeted by the Federal Department of Narcotics with an undercover sting operation led by black Federal Agent Jimmy Fletcher, with whom she has a tumultuous affair.Follows Holiday during her career as she is targeted by the Federal Department of Narcotics with an undercover sting operation led by black Federal Agent Jimmy Fletcher, with whom she has a tumultuous affair.
- Nominated for 1 Oscar
- 12 wins & 25 nominations total
Warren 'Slim' Williams
- Bobby Tucker
- (as Slim Williams)
- Director
- Writers
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Featured reviews
This version is so much more like the way I pictured Lady Day. Miss Day did an excellent job. This was raw and much better then the sugar coated Motown version. I would have given it 10 stars but it seemed very disjointed in the beginning.
I have been a fan of Billie 'Lady Day' Holiday for the majority of my life, and I thought that this movie didn't necessarily depict her life, instead it primarily focused on the government and Billie Holiday due to her drug abuse. I thought that the film depicted her in a pretty bad light, rather than depicting the amazing impact that she had on the world during the civil rights movement in the US as well as impacting the music industry, exploring the important affects and terrible, toxic environment within the industry. However, I did think that Andra Day, who played Billie Holiday, gave an amazing performance of the artist. The performances of the actors and actresses was amazing, all of them combined as they showed the raw, intimate relations between the people. However the major problem with the movie was how they depicted her life and had it primarily surrounding her drug addiction.
Amazing, seasoned performance from a new actress. She nailed it, and i believe she will make it all the way to the Oscars.
Lady Day deserves much better than this muddled, often tedious and substantially apocryphal "biopic" from Lee Daniels. In this telling of Billie Holiday's life the song Strange Fruit becomes central to the narrative, with government forces determined to stop her singing the mournful lament, afraid that it will ignite a civil rights movement. At one point she's even dragged from the stage after singing just the first few lines. The problem with all of this is it never happened. Federal Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger apparently claimed in letters that he "asked" holiday not to sing the song, but - even if that's true - that's about as far as it went. Holiday was never dragged off stage for singing the song; in fact, she sang the song in the very concert in which the film depicts this as happening. In any case, the civil rights movement was already a growing force long before Strange Fruit became a popular protest song. As for Billie, she was never especially political and was initially ambivalent about performing Strange Fruit. She was convinced more by the way it would be dramatically staged as a final number than by any notions about the political clout of the lyrics. So to make the song central to her life and have Billie so passionate about performing it any cost is in itself dishonest. But then so much of Daniels' film, from the weird Quentin Crisp-like Reginald Lord Divine character who interviews Billie (he never existed) to the romantic affair with FBI agent Jimmy Fletcher, for which there is zero evidence. At best the film offers brief glimpses into the reality of Billie's life, but they're so swamped with apocrypha that you'll have trouble identifying them. Which makes this a pretty messed up biopic, and an extremely half-assed tribute to the great singer. The only saving grace in all of this is Andra Day, who manages to look and sound like Billie for the most part. But even here there are caveats. Day's performances of Holiday's songs are more impressive as vocal impressions than they are for evoking the emotion and pathos that made Billie legendary. And, sad to say, her rendition of Strange Fruit is oddly stilted, almost bland. Not to mention severely truncated. Never mind that this is the song the entire film revolves around. Strange, indeed.
The movie is a bit slow at first but then it got me hooked up to it really fast. I loved andra day's performance so much. Everytime she sang, I felt it
Did you know
- TriviaThe songwriter of "Strange Fruit", Abel Meeropol, and his wife, adopted and raised the sons of Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for treason on June 19, 1953.
- GoofsAt 36:33, an elderly couple of Chinese are speaking standard Mandarin in a restaurant presumably in Harlem. However, Mandarin speakers would have been extremely rare in New York or anywhere else beyond Northern China at that time and for several decades afterwards. Any Chinese in New York and the rest of the States and Europe would have been speaking Cantonese, Hokkien, or some other Southern Chinese dialect, with the exception of the wealthier Shanghainese, who had their own dialect until very recently.
- Quotes
Billie Holiday: You know, the people that are hardest on me are my own race. I need help; not jail time.
- ConnectionsFeatured in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: Tom Holland/Andra Day (2021)
- SoundtracksPrologue I & II
Written, Produced and Performed by Salaam Remi
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Details
- Release date
- Country of origin
- Official sites
- Languages
- Also known as
- Estados Unidos vs. Billie Holiday
- Filming locations
- Montréal, Québec, Canada(location)
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Gross worldwide
- $1,312,432
- Runtime2 hours 6 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 2.39 : 1
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By what name was Billie Holiday, une affaire d'État (2021) officially released in India in English?
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