Gaga: Five Foot Two (2017)

Chris Moukarbel's camera follows Lady Gaga through eight months of recording, promoting and rehearsing, and it does so with a discipline that borders on the monastic. No talking heads. No archival montage to explain the iconography. Just a woman cooking at home, then a woman in a studio, then a woman in a doctor's chair being told her body will not cooperate. The chronic pain sequences carry the film's emotional weight, and they are handled without a thesis attached. Fibromyalgia is presented as an affliction, not a platform.

The film does lean forward when it comes to gender. Gaga speaks about the power male producers hold over women in her industry, about Marilyn Monroe and Anna Nicole Smith as cautionary figures, about the machinery that consumes female performers and then bills them for the wreckage. These passages give the documentary a discernible feminist pulse. They are also the only passages that do. The film never organizes itself around an argument, and it never asks the audience to applaud a position.

That restraint is the whole of its character. A performer this closely identified with queer audiences makes a documentary that treats that identification as ambient rather than central. A topless scene by a pool arrives and departs without a word about bodies as a political subject. Race, climate, and the economics of the music business go untouched, though a Walmart aisle makes a brief, silent cameo. The result is a portrait of an artist negotiating the conditions of her own labor, occasionally sermonizing, mostly just tired. It is a modest film about a large person, and it knows better than to raise its voice.