let it come down: the life of paul bowles

Jennifer Baichwal, Canada, 1998

Producers synopsis
Paul Bowles, who has lived in Tangier, Morocco for over fifty years, is the quintessential iconoclast. He left the US for good in the 1940s after building an illustrious career as a composer, rejected the heroic identity requisite to expatriate American writers and buried himself in the culture of North Africa. A writer’s writer, his associations span the elite cultural circles of this century. His unorthodox marriage to writer Jane Bowles-both were gay and had significant relationships with others throughout their marriage-is legendary. Together they formed the magnet which drew an extraordinary group of writers and artists to the exotic freedoms of Morocco before independence. In this definitive film biography, the notoriously laconic and reclusive Bowles finally speaks out on the subjects he has remained silent about over the years. Lying in bed at his home in Tangier and smoking kif with an elegant black cigarette holder, he reflects on his life, his work, Jane, love and his friends with unprecedented candour. Now 87 years old, his tone is almost omniscient, as though he is surveying both life and death from some lofty interim vantage point.