Florian Habicht’s Pulp is not a biographical film. Its subject is a concert—Pulp’s homecoming show and tour finale at the Motorpoint Arena at the end of 2012—but it isn’t really a concert film, either. Pulp is barely about Pulp. Habicht calls it a film about “life, death, and supermarkets.” That isn’t far off. Pulp is in part a work portraiture—of Jarvis Cocker, Steve Mackey, Candida Doyle, Nick Banks, and Mark Webber, framed here 25 years after coming together to form a band. But more than anything else this is a film about Pulp’s hometown of Sheffield, England—its people and places, how they inform Pulp’s music and how Pulp’s music informs them. This isn’t an ordinary music documentary. This is hardcore.
On December 8th, 2012, Pulp concluded a two-year, 47-gig reunion tour. It was the end of a stint that brought them to Istanbul, Bucharest, Gdynia, Dour, Oslo, Melbourne, and Sao Paolo. They headlined Primavera, Reading Festival, Electric Picnic, and Coachella (twice). They’d played the Royal Albert Hall in London and Radio City Music Hall in New York.
Sheffield, on the other hand, is a steel town with a little over half a million residents, best known internationally for manufacturing cutlery. The city’s estimable Motorpoint Arena seats 13,000 and has served as the official home, since 2007, of the Premier League Darts, one of the sport’s most widely venerated tournaments. Naturally the venue is ideally suited to the culmination of a band’s 25-year history. Pulp weren’t about to wrap up their career in some illustrious concert hall or gleaming high-priced theater. Better that they end the way they started: among the common people.
It’s only fitting, then, that Habicht plunges us among them too. Pulp spends about as much time wandering around the streets of Sheffield in the company of strangers as it does backstage with the members of the band, and the result is a film whose spirit is distinctly communal. The characters who populate the picture look as if they belong in an early Errol Morris movie: an elderly admirer professes her preference for Pulp over Blur (“more melodic... and better words, actually”); a young apprentice butcher in the Castle Market describes Jarvis Cocker’s apparently legendary stint as a teenage fishmonger; and a local musician named Bomar waxes poetic about the restorative power of Pulp’s music and the kindness of the Sheffield people. What unites them all, of course, is Pulp.
Bomar knows precisely what Habicht is up to: “Are you trying to get like a snapshot of Sheffield life, and relate it back? Ah.” Sometimes that means talking to people who are only vaguely familiar with “Common People” and the reputed dance moves of Jarvis Cocker. Other times it means talking to people who don’t know anything at all about them: One of the film’s best moments finds Habicht asking three small children to listen to “Disco 2000” and give their thoughts to the camera (“It just gets you to wanna, like, boogie on the dance floor”).
And there are interviews, as you might expect, with the band’s legions of dedicated fans, hanging about the venue hours early in custom-made “I Love Jarvis” tees, hoping to catch even the briefest glimpse of their dweeby matinee idol. These moments are endearing largely for how enamored the obsessives seem of a sex symbol who never thought he could be one; it’s difficult to reconcile, even 20 years after the height of their popularity, the dryly witty milquetoast found self-deprecating backstage here and the thousands of teenaged girls he apparently captivates. The Jarvis Cocker speaking candidly to Habicht a button-down and blazer looks as if he’d be more at home in a Banana Republic than in a band. But then you see him on stage, and suddenly it makes sense: Up there he’s in control of himself and he’s in control of the audience. On stage, he’s a rock star.
And Pulp, of course, does make time for rock, dedicating most of its last act to the Motorpoint performance and giving us lengthy excerpts from about a half a dozen songs, with an emphasis on the best-known singles. Part of what distinguishes Pulp from other music documentaries is the incredibly specific sense of place, and that holds true, remarkably, even during the performance itself: the time the film spends amidst the locals impresses upon us a sense that this show could not be happening anywhere else. We’ve been around these concertgoers: We’ve seen them talk about their lives and about what Pulp means to them. We know, as a result, that the final show means as much to the people in attendance as it does to the band performing it.