(The court subsequently barred Streisand from representing Spears on grounds of inability to seek counsel based on a sealed medical report, and appointed the lawyer Samuel D Ingham III to represent her instead as of 2016, Ingham had collected $2m in fees from Spears’ estate). Adam Streisand, a Los Angeles-based lawyer who specializes in conservatorship arrangements, recalls in the film a meeting with Spears at the Beverly Hills Hotel immediately after her involuntary psychiatric hold in January 2008 – an event heavily documented by paparazzi at the time – in which the singer reportedly accepted the conservatorship on one condition: that the conservator not be her father. Much of the film is dedicated to explaining the legal concept of conservatorship – a court-appointed guardianship usually for elderly or infirm people – and subtly (or, with a couple of first-person interviews, not so subtly) arguing against the arrangement that places Britney’s father, Jamie Spears (according to the film, a largely absent figure in her life until money was concerned), in control of a 39-year-old pop star still raking in millions. In a brisk, bracing 75 minutes, Framing Britney combs through the mountain of archival Britney material – coming of age just before the internet, she was a heavily documented star from the start – from her childhood in smalltown Kentwood, Louisiana, to the cascading highlights of her career: tinkering in the studio, the smash success of … Baby One More Time and Oops I Did It Again, mass fascination over her relationship with the ‘NSync boybander Justin Timberlake, marriage to backup dancer Kevin Federline, mass fascination with her fitness as a mother, breakdown. We just don’t often sit with the evidence – not this cohesively, not this viscerally. None of these images, none of this information about Britney’s stratospheric teenage fame, mental breakdown in 2008, and the legal conservatorship that has governed her daily life in the 13 years since, is new. The uncomfortable quality of these images and video is due, in large part, to their mundanity – a celebrity off-stage, doing unremarkable things the paparazzi hordes that were a staple of the mid-2000s, at the height of TMZ, tabloid and gossip blog power the familiarity of the whole circus, which exists in America’s collective cultural memory as time capsule, old joke, or well-meaning meme (the classic “If Britney could survive 2007, you can do this” joke). There’s Britney, messy bun and sweats, picking up fast food under a barrage of camera flashes, appearing catatonic in a passenger seat under a barrage of camera flashes, crumpled in a restaurant booth under a barrage of camera flashes by 2007, with a shorn head and glazed eyes, clearly having a mental breakdown, strobe-lit by said camera flashes. There’s Britney, tanned and polished at the height of her early-aughts fame, asked in a press conference if she is a virgin (she balks, then answers yes, then, ever the pleasant American sweetheart, thanks the interviewer for the question). There’s Britney, 10 years old and having just belted out an impressive rendition of the Judds’ Love Can Build a Bridge on Star Search, asked by the host Ed McMahon if she had a boyfriend.
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