Marvin Gaye - Searching Soul

Review

In early 1980s Marvin Gaye left USA and Los Angeles to hide his creditors and drug orientated life. Marvin settled in a seaside city called Ostend in Belgium and met film maker Richard Olivier who then spent some time filming Marvins life and interviewing him. As the back cover of the DVD says "..Searching Soul provides in his own words and music a personal insight into the man, his battles and the joy of his spirit as he prepares for a revival concert at the Ostend Casino.."

So, basicly this video is about Marvin walking around places in Ostend telling a little about him self and his life, meeting belgian people and most of all seeing Marvin rehearsal his songs for the consert at the Ostend Casino. As being a (quite artistic) documentary film it also has here and there some odd clips from old silent films creating a funny athmosphere. Best pieces of this DVD are definitely the performances of "Come Get To This", "Distant Lover" and "I Want You". First two of these Marvin plays by him self in the empty concert hall with a grand piano and I must say that he sounds absolutely fantastic. I actually had to grab these tracks from the DVD to be able to play them in a car. During the video Marvin walks around at beach, plays some darts at a local pub and sings "The Lord's Prayer" at the church. In the end Marvin rehearsals with his groovy band singin a great version of "I Want You" (I had to grab this track too) and a bit annoying version of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine".

Quality of this DVD is fairly poor. The covers of the package and the discs look quite nice, but unfortunately have really a lot writing errors (just like my text). The video quality is really grainy and blurred and the audio buzzez a bit if listenet with greater volume. The audio CD is absolutely the poorest effort in the package as only 14 tracks from 16 listed were present, missing two mentioned on the right and that's not all. The audio quality on this cd is really awful. I can't say for sure, but I thinks these tracks might have a lot in common with the album "The Last Concert Tour". I don't have that album my self but I happened to listen some short previews from that at some webstore and they sounded just the same as this and the reviews of that cd sounded very familiar too. If you know more please let me know.

NOTICE!

Some time a go (near marvins deaths 20th anniversary) I noticed a program called "Remember Marvin" on Finnish digital channel "YLE Teema", which seemed to be just the same as the documentary featured here. After some searching I found out that it actually is the same as this "Searching Soul", but in addition 30 minutes longer directors cut (never had a chance to see that tv program, because I don't own a digibox). I also found out that someone at amazon.com introducing him self as Richard Olivier (the director of the video) claimed that "Searching Soul DVD" is an illegal copy of his documentary originally called "Marvin GAYE transit Ostende". He also said that the poor quality of this DVD is because it's not the original copy. I can't judge anyone, but if this is true I think people should get one of these original videos instead of this DVD release. So I can only recommend this DVD for those total fans of Marvin who like collecting stuff like this and you really should get the original one if possible.

ps. It also makes me wonder the legality of the CD included too.

For more info about the original documentaries go to Richard Oliviers homepage www.olivier-films.be