MOVIE REVIEW : BLAKLEY SHARES A RAW SLICE OF LIFE

Actress-singer Ronee Blakley has taken the raw material of her last seven years and made a deeply personal feature-length film about work, marriage and/or love, “I Played It for You” (at the Fox International through Thursday, for Academy Award qualification).

Since those years have included composing and singing almost an album’s worth of songs and her engagement, marriage and breakup with film maker Wim Wenders--during which time the two worked on “Lightning Over Water,” a portrait of the raging and ravaged last days of director Nicholas Ray--this might be thought a gold mine for movie gossips.

But Blakley fools them. “I Played It for You” is certainly a one-sided view of their relationship, yet you sense that time, and perhaps her music, have gotten her over the most scalding part of her pain. She doesn’t feel much need to assign blame. Rather, she quotes Picasso: “Love has a time limit,” and the tone of the film is rueful.

Wenders is, of course, a player in it. Sometimes literally, as “Howard,” the tall, enigmatic European stranger in a curious film fragment that he also directed. In this self-conscious, improvised dream-drama of meeting and parting, with musician friends and cronies filling the other roles, he plays a black-suited newcomer and Blakley is a sort of country siren, posed against a bar, shootin’ a little pool and lookin’ for somebody she can trust. “You think you can trust yourself?” Howard/Wenders asks piercingly. It’s one of the film’s crucial questions. Blakley attacks it numerous times and receives varying answers.

Wenders is there as himself too. He has, from what she tells us in a useful voice-over, also been an adviser to Blakley on how to shape the film, telling her that she must get more private and more explicit, quoting Nicholas Ray that the universality achieved in exposing one’s (true) self becomes a generous act.

“I Played It for You” may have a heady, narcissistic feel to it (the sultry Blakley is almost always the object of the camera’s affection; she sings about a dozen songs, improvises, relives past joys and even hints at a glittery, manic quality that may not have been completely restful to live with), but it is also poignant, and at times even humorous. (Blakley has a clown’s sudden unexpected physicality--she’ll run backwards, hop over a puddle in an antic manner, dodge a camera with physical charm). She emerges from cameraman Ed Lachman’s close scrutiny as this generation’s Gene Tierney--who can sing.

The strength of “I Played It for You” comes in watching Blakley right herself again after her loss. She channels much of the anger and the questioning into songs, rich, full-tilt songs, most of which feature her close friend Scarlet Rivera in electric violin obbligato. It is a haunting sound. (Yet, friendly as the two women genuinely seem, you feel that Blakley’s whole orientation is toward men; there’s never a sense of musical conspiracy between the two during a number, as there occasionally is between Blakley and some of her male musicians.)

“I Played It for You” is a heady affair, spilling over with private associations, linkages that an outsider may never hope to understand. It’s obscure and opaque at times, but it is also passionate and brave, an absorbing first film.

‘I PLAYED IT FOR YOU’ Producer, writer, director Ronee Blakley. Camera Ed Lachman. Additional photography Wim Wenders. Music produced by Rob Fraboni. Post-production supervision, editing Elon Soltes. Sound Maryte Kavaliauskas. With Blakley, Wenders, Scarlet Rivera, Harley Stumbaugh, musical groups Eulogy, the Old Dog Band.

Running time: 1 hour, 11 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.