Kylie ★★★★★
The big reveal in Kylie, the excellent three-part documentary about Kylie Minogue from the team behind Beckham, comes right at the end. In 2021, the cancer she had first battled 16 years earlier came back.
The first time round, her health crisis played out in the full glare of the world’s media while she was camped out at her parents’ house in Melbourne, before retreating to the relative anonymity of Paris for chemo. The second time, Minogue kept the news very much to herself – until now.
“I don’t feel obliged to tell the world,” she says in a teary session with her songwriting collaborators in London in the final episode of the series. “And actually, I couldn’t at the time because I was just a shell of a person.”
She reveals that even while she was basking in the renewed visibility and success spawned by Padam Padam in 2023 – the song went on to win her a Grammy and set up a Las Vegas residency – she was struggling to find the words to talk about what she was going through, “so I can let go of it”. It was only when she sat down with her songwriting partners Gez O’Connell, Biff Stannard and Duck Blackwell and wrote Story, the final track on her 2023 album Tension, that she was able to give her sorrow form.
“I had a secret that I kept to myself, yeah,” she sings shakily with the men as she finally makes public the sentiment behind the lyrics. “I had a one-way ticket that was going nowhere.”
Of course, Story soon enough resolves into an upbeat dance number; that’s the Minogue way. As Nick Cave says of his fellow Australian, his duet partner on 1995’s murder ballad Where the Wild Roses Grow, “what the world loves about Kylie is that she really went through something … that’s the sort of definition of joy in a way, which is the capacity to be able to rise out of a certain suffering.”
There’s plenty of that across the three hours of Kylie – much of it about heartbreak and her often brutal treatment at the hands of critics who saw her rise as too fast, too easy and too lacking in substance. But it’s not hard to imagine that for its subject the greatest suffering lay in having to submit to the scrutiny (albeit friendly) of the filmmakers.
Minogue is a woman who has lived much of her life for the past 40 years in the public eye, but she’s also intensely private – and that tension between what’s revealed and what must remain hidden is at the heart of this fascinating, occasionally frustrating, but ultimately rewarding exercise.
“I am my own worst enemy,” she says towards the end, as she addresses the possibility that she might step away from the spotlight in favour of a quiet life. “It’s like, ‘Go away everyone. Where is everyone?’ Maximum three days between those two phrases. Sometimes just a few hours.”
There are times here when she acknowledges her reluctance to open up, and others when she admits it’s not as hard as she feared it would be. By the end you feel we’ve caught at least a glimpse of the real Kylie: self-deprecating but rightly proud of what she’s achieved; blessed by good fortune and tormented by her critics because of it; boundlessly positive but no stranger to disappointment. It’s the Impossible Princess as highly probable human being, and it’s utterly compelling.
She talks about her failed attempts to conceive via IVF following her battle with the cancer she was diagnosed with at age 36. It’s not the first time she’s mentioned it, but the pain of not becoming the mother she always imagined she would be is absolutely palpable.
She talks about the ambition that took her to London and ultimately derailed her first big love affair, with her Neighbours co-star Jason Donovan. He talks about it, too, and it’s clear the pain of that long-ago break-up still burns in him.
She talks about her romance with Michael Hutchence, and this time it’s she who still carries the torch.
“It might seem disproportionate, the emotion and the memories I have with him and with that time,” she says of the late INXS singer, whom she dated for about 18 months in her early 20s. “But I just felt protected and nurtured and valued and believed in … he really didn’t want me to be someone else for him at all. He was encouraging me to discover me.”
There are glimpses of Kylie in rehearsal, in the studio, and of course on stage. She’s tiny, but in concert – with costumes, dancers, big production – she’s larger than life. Up close and personal, she’s still that kid we see in the archival footage and photos dreaming of a career on stage, and working damned hard to make it reality.
There’s a lot she doesn’t say – about the other big relationships in her life, or the sexism of the media, or ageism in the business – but ultimately Kylie serves as a celebration of the healing power and, yes, the validity, of pop music.
“I might not be blessed with a voice from the heavens,” Minogue says at one point. “[But] I don’t have anyone else’s voice. What I have is my voice.”
It’s enough.
Kylie is now streaming on Netflix.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
