Right at the start of this, Naomie Harris is walking along a New Orleans street when she’s stopped and harassed by two cops. For no reason. Well, there is a reason: she’s black and the cops are white. Except that, as she points out, she herself is a cop too. She’s blue. So reluctantly they have to let her go.
Alicia West (Harris) may be a rookie in her first weeks as a cop, but she’s hardly inexperienced, having served as a soldier in Afghanistan’s Kandahar. She’s joined the police at the same time as officers are being required to wear body cams and thinks these a good idea. However she underestimates the levels of violence meted out by police to members of the public and, conversely, by members of the public to police. Covering for her partner cop Kevin Jennings (Reid Scott) who had planned an evening with his wife before being asked to do a night shift at short notice, she finds herself working alongside grizzled veteran Deacon Brown (James Moses Black) and is shocked to see him use what she thinks is excessive force on a man outside a nightclub. It turns out, however, that the man had a gun and wouldn’t have hesitated to use it on her.
Later on their shift, Brown gets a call which leads them to a warehouse in a derelict urban wasteland. He tells her to stay in the car while he goes inside, but after hearing gunshots she goes in after him . The scene that comes next is the one upon which the film pivots. She sees someone shot – indeed, executed is not too strong a word – by a police officer before the gun is turned on her person and she falls several storeys. Worse, the bent cops have seen her body cam.
From here on in it’s a game of cat and mouse as witness rookie cop attempts to get cam and footage back to headquarters to upload it to the system while a combination of corrupt cops and criminals will stop at nothing to prevent her doing so. Shooter Terry Malone (Frank Grillo) informs the intimidating Darius (Mike Colter) that Alicia West shot Darius’ nephew Zero, so Darius puts the word out by mobile phone. So Alicia finds that not only the bad guys but the entire local community are after her as well. That includes the standoffish Missy (Nafessa Williams), the friend she couldn’t persuade to leave town with her all those years ago.
The film has a further ace up its sleeve in the form of Milo ‘Mouse’ Jackson (a memorable Tyrese Gibson) in whose general store West hides from the cops after every domestic door upon which she knocks refuses her entry. He calls the cops and consequently finds himself on the receiving end of racist abuse. Later, he turns out to be the one friend West has in her quest to deliver the footage and see justice done.
The tense action scenes which follow are skilfully choreographed and photographed and will keep you on the edge of your seat. As a gritty, cops and robbers film, this consequently does everything that’s required of it – and on one level, that ought to be enough. However, the indictment of racism underpinning the whole, with its privileged white cops and its ordinary black locals who don’t trust them because they simply can’t afford to is part of what raises the film to a whole other level. The urban deprivation of post-Katrina New Orleans further underscores all this. And better still, it’s not trying to make a Big Worthy Statement about the US and racism – the racism is simply there as an undercurrent of everything else that’s going on, a far more effective way of highlighting the issue.
Terrific performances by all concerned help no end. Naomie Harris completely convinces as the blue caught between the white privilege of her profession and the black community in which she grew up. Harris has never had a role quite like this – and what she puts on the screen is a revelation.
Finally, be advised that the trailer sells the film as a solid action film. In one sense, that’s true, that’s exactly what it is. However, churning out a run of the mill, bog standard industry trailer does the film a terrible disservice, implying it’s little more than Studio multiplex filler. Yet it’s so much more. This is a dirtylicious gem where you were expecting a mere, by-the-numbers action movie. Don’t miss.
Black And Blue is out in the UK on Friday, October 25th. Available on VoD in March. Watch the film trailer below:
Its title speaks of powerlessness in the face of an irresistible force and an involuntary movement in respect of a man-made, industrial era material suggesting a modern urban environment. Several characters inflict and/or are forced to endure suffering in a variety of unpleasant forms. Curiously, the literal dragging across concrete scene late in the over two-and-a-half-hour running length involves the towrope pulling of a wrecked car by a fully working one without any actual suffering at the point of dragging. Before and after, yes, but not at that point. And that scene isn’t in an urban environment at all but rather on a piece of industrial wasteland presaged by a discarded refrigerator and a dead rat on a dark road.
S. Craig Zahler’s third directorial outing after Bone Tomahawk (2015) and Brawl In Cell Block 99 (2017) boasts two starting points. A black ex-con comes out of prison and discovers his mother in debt and working as a prostitute. Two white cops are suspended for excessive violence after being caught on mobile phone video when arresting a Latino suspect. As in those earlier two films, the American director builds on his characters and their separate plights to construct a slow-paced but relentless journey through to his narrative’s conclusion. At the end it all makes perfect sense. However, on your first viewing you won’t see what’s coming. It plays out as a power struggle between various factions of white people at various social levels and black underdogs not content to stay in their place.
Ex-con Henry Johns (Tory Kittles, surely destined for major stardom on the strength of his performance here) is approached by old mate Biscuit (Michael Jai White) who is looking for help on an upcoming job which very quickly places both men well out of their depth. Meanwhile, Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn) are the older and the younger cop who although on official leave following their suspension are pursuing leads which may or may not lead them to a crime – with half an eye on making a financial killing rather than upholding the law.
Zahler is a master of characterisation and knows how to direct with a minimum of fuss allowing actors to do what they do brilliantly. He also knows how to plot a movie. The whole thing clocks in at just more than two and a half hours, but you won’t notice the time. He manages to make, for example, two cops sat in a car on a stakeout into compulsive viewing as they interact with one another. There are many similarly low key scenes involving small numbers of characters from which the wider whole would lose something if you cut them out.
The opening image shows the black Henry having sex with a white woman in bed. He always fancied her in school. While he’s certainly having a good time, she maybe isn’t so much. It turns out their meeting was set up by Biscuit as a favour to Henry. The next woman we see is Henry’s mother who got into debt while he was in prison and into prostitution to pay the debt. Now he’s out of prison, Henry vows to take control and sort her debt out. Rosalinda (Liannet Borrego) is the deaf girlfriend of Vasquez (Noel G), the dealer the two cops arrest at the start: she is involuntarily soaked in a shower, stood under a cold air fan and questioned. The two cops “can’t understand” her protests because of her Latino accent.
Soon afterwards, we’re introduced to the nearest and dearest of each of the cops. Ridgeman’s daughter Sara (Jordyn Ashley Olson) is the teenage victim of a bicycling black youth throwing a soft drink in her face near her home, his wife Melanie (Laurie Holden) a former cop struck down with MS who these days needs a cane to get around. Lurasetti’s black girlfriend Denise (Tattiawna Jones), the one woman here seemingly in control of her life, is a power-dressing professional constantly on her mobile to colleagues and clients. We never discover exactly what she does, but it involves a high degree of organisation and self-motivation and her phone conversations suggest she’s really good at it.
Part way through the narrative we meet Kelley Summer (Jennifer Carpenter), returning after maternity leave to her detested but high paying job in a financial district bank at the behest of the manipulative father of their baby. If that sounds grim, it’s nothing compared to the extremely nasty humiliations that will later be inflicted upon her as the plot unfolds.
Apart from Denise, all the women are victims. They are peripheral in this male world, even if their roles as mothers, partners or offspring motivate their menfolk to do what they do. Most of the men locked in to the overarching narrative from start to finish are victims too.
The ruthlessly efficient, criminal gang leader Lorentz Vogelmann (Thomas Kretschmann) spends much of the proceedings with his two masked sidekicks in the back of an armoured van being driven by the two black guys Henry and Biscuit. Elsewhere, memorable male characters are tossed into the mix for little more than one scene each: Police Chief Lt. Calvert (Don Johnson) gives the two cops a hard time, Fredrich (Udo Kier) is a shady character who owes Ridgeman, Mr. Edmington (Fred Melamed) is Kelley’s ingratiating boss at the bank.
Zahler is far more interested in telling a rattling good yarn and exploring character nuance than in playing to political correctness. If you can get past the pervasive misogyny of the piece, this slow-burner of an urban crime thriller with its gripping performances great and small will have you on the edge of your seat. A bleak and original vision of the world – and a dirtylicious treat.
Dragged Across Concrete is out in the UK on Friday, April 19th. On VoD on Monday, August 19th.
The couple walks along. They’re completely in love. “Are you ready for this?”, asks Fonny (Stephan James). “I’ve never been more ready for anything in my whole life”, replies Tish (newcomer KiKi Layne).
Welcome to a movie that is at once one of the most romantic of the year – out just in time for Valentine’s Day – and a gritty indictment of the way black people are treated in the USA. Which sounds a pretty unlikely mix, but then Barry Jenkins is hardly an average director. His Best Picture Oscar winning Moonlight (2016) proved this for this writer by having one character at three different ages played by three actors and making that potentially disastrous proposition work so brilliantly on the screen.
If Beale Street Could Talk‘s source material is a 1974 novel set in Harlem by US writer James Baldwin (1924-1987) who explored the black experience in some considerable depth and is the subject of highly recommended documentary I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2017). The novel is Baldwin‘s response to the incarceration of black people for crimes they have not committed by a system, as he sees it, designed to keep them in their place through systematic abuse and mistreatment. Baldwin has a gift for writing about people, what makes them tick, their good and bad qualities.
The film’s romantic opening soon gives way to something else: Tish visits Fonny, in prison for a crime he did not commit, to tell him she’s going to have his baby. The only way they can communicate is through a glass partition. They’ve been friends since childhood and are now partners as adults. But they’re not married and she’s got to tell her and his parents about the baby. And the family have to find a way to get him out of prison.
The narrative is a clever exercise in parallel editing. One strand shows Tish and Fonny’s life together, growing into love, finding an apartment, his being picked on by a racist cop (Ed Skrein). The other shows Tish’s story following Fonny’s incarceration, her telling both their families about the baby, the ongoing life process of pregnancy, birth and raising a son, fighting for her partner’s release with her mother’s help.
The two leads are terrific. KiKi Layne is a real find, capturing a mixture of innocence and fragility on the one hand and a perseverance and strength on the other. The latter is something Tish gets from her parents, especially her mother Sharon (Regina King) who at one point has to fly to Puerto Rico to persuade gone to earth witness Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios) to testify that Fonny wasn’t the man who raped her.
Although he gets less screen time, Stephan James as Fonny is good too whether showing Fonny’s essential optimism in his life in the outside world or his attempt to hold himself together as prison life threatens to make him fall apart, the latter experience only really seen from Tish’s side of the glass partition when she visits him. (There is no attempt to otherwise show Fonny’s prison life beyond such visitation scenes, no way the film might be described as a prison movie).
In addition there are numerous impressive bit parts – the film is surely destined to become a future Who’s Who of Black US acting talent – and other aspects of the production do it proud too. The sequence where first Tish’s family then Fonny’s react to the news of her pregnancy deserves a special mention, there being much to say about the way Tish’s family, despite being oppressed by a system rigged against their race, practise life-affirming values in marked contrast to Fonny’s family where father is driven to rage by feelings of powerlessness while mother and daughters use legalistic Biblical language to lord it over the “sinful” Tish.
Special mentions should go to James Laxton’s cinematography for juxtaposing the lush, vivid palette of a seventies Harlem romance against the harsh, brutal colours of an oppressive prison environment (exactly the qualities that seemed to be absent from the cinematography of that other recent, period New York movie Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and an achingly beautiful score by Nicholas Britell. That said, this is one of those movies where all the technical people and their departments, those unsung, behind the scenes heroes of movie-making, each more than pull their individual weight to contribute to a whole that adds up to far, far more than the (considerable) sum of its parts.
This remarkable film consolidates Barry Jenkins’ achievement in Moonlight and deserves to be even more widely seen, not only because it so beautifully articulates the black experience in the racist society that is the USA but also because it’s so well put together in terms of all aspects of movie-making craft. The cast, main and bit parts, are to die for and it’s a great introduction to the writings of James Baldwin to boot. See it.
If Beale Street Could Talk is out in the UK on Friday, February 8th. On VoD on Friday, June 21st.
Here’s a Christmas movie with a difference. It’s December 1985 and young New York ad agency man Adrian (Cory Michael Smith) flies home to Texas to see his family for the first time in several years. Tensions are immediately apparent between go-getter son and his blue-collar worker father Dale (Michael Chiklis) from the moment the latter picks him up from the airport. Once Adrian gets to the house, his devoted mother Eileen (Virginia Madsen) can’t stop fussing over him while his younger brother Andrew (Aidan Langford), in his early teens, is distant having never forgiven Adrian for leaving.
Each of the family members presents Adrian with a different challenge. Dad is horrified at his Christmas present of an expensive leather jacket while Adrian is slightly shocked to receive a brand new Bible. Mom encourages him to call up Carly (Jamie Chung), a girl with whom Adrian grew up who also left Texas and is likewise home for the holidays and who he hasn’t seen for years. Andrew quit the school football team for its drama society, which is giving him issues with the father who understands contact sports but doesn’t really get the arts.
Underneath all of this is the presence of the local conservative Christian church, briefly heard as dad sits listening to sermons on a Christian radio station and seen as a worship service which the family attend in Sunday best where Adrian struggles to sing the words of hymns which make him uneasy. Elsewhere, Adrian has an embarrassing encounter with former high school jock turned supermarket manager Mark (Ryan Piers Williams) who has become a Christian and apologises for his past treatment of Adrian, although the two clearly have nothing in common.
Adrian learns from Andrew that his younger brother’s Madonna music cassettes and Bryan Adams poster have been taken off him because the local pastor deems them ungodly. When Andrew discovers that his brother saw Madonna on tour, he suddenly has a new-found respect for him. As a covert Christmas present, Adrian gives him a $100 voucher for the local Sound Warehouse to replenish his audio cassette collection, admonishing Andrew to keep his purchases hidden.
Contacting Carly, Adrian is invited to see her do an impressive improv stand-up gig where she expresses “all the shit you daredn’t say in real life”. Following some time at a dance club, they go back to hers which ends badly when she comes on strong to him but he isn’t really interested. As he tells her, “I’ve had a shitty year.”
Shot in aesthetically pleasing black and white by Ten’s cameraman and co-screenwriter Hutch, this boasts a strong script with deftly sketched characters and is beautifully cast and acted to boot. It completely understands its chosen time period of the mid-eighties, a time of LP records and portable music cassette players, before mobile phones and the internet existed. The film grasps very profound topics: the pain of the gay community being decimated by the AIDS virus in urban locations like New York and the deficiencies of Bible Belt Protestant fundamentalism in its inability to comfort those feeling that pain. And it grasps them without judgement of one side or another.
This is full of genuinely touching moments. Via an overheard conversation in another room, Adrian hears his mother tell his father he really ought to wear that leather jacket to work. Carly’s stand-up routine details her heartfelt experiences of racism as a Korean-American. And in a frank conversation with his mother, Adrian learns that she… well, you’ll have to see the film to find out.
Most people have experienced the joys and heartaches of spending time with their families at Christmas. While 1985 is set in the Christmas of that year, and some of its issues are specific to that date and time, there’s also much here that relates to wider human issues of family, how children deal with parents and siblings, how parents deal with children and how, sometimes, with the best intentions, that can all go horribly wrong. And can then sometimes, somehow, tentatively, in small steps, be at least partly put right.
A Christmas treat.
1985 is out in the UK on Thursday, December 20th, and then on VoD on Monday, December 24th. Watch the film trailer below:
It’s too easy to take most British WW2 movies (e.g. Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, 2017) and claim they bolster the idea of Brexit – Britain alone against the world, defeating the dastardly Germans and so on. Hurricane is different. Its Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots are refugees from the Polish Air Force, wiped out by the Luftwaffe in a mere three days and kept on ice by Britain’s xenophobic War Office following their arrival in England. When they’re finally allowed into the air, these Poles turn out to be much better fighter pilots than the majority of Brits who are being slaughtered by the enemy at an alarming rate. Indeed, it’s the Polish pilots that turn the Battle of Britain around.
Hurricane is named after the RAF’s most widely used fighter aircraft and those portrayed here, at least when flying, are computer generated. Much of the CG work has been carried out in India (nothing wrong with that) on the cheap. The aircraft looks like computer models partly because no-one’s bothered to dirty them up and partly because there’s no attempt at reflecting the weather on their metal surfaces as real flying aircraft surfaces would do. Consequently, the flying sequences have an air of unreality about them which a little more budgetary spending in the right places could easily have fixed.
Other elements more than compensate for the cost-cutting CG, however. The dogfight sequences are well put together and grippingly paced. The main characters are efficiently written and the film covers a lot of historical ground. The pilots speak Polish with subtitles when they’re alone together while the Brits speak English. There’s more than enough aerial combat to satisfy audiences, yet the scenes on the ground prove equally compelling – interaction between cocky Polish pilots who know they’re up to the job and members of the British command convinced the bloody foreigners are not, Poles fraternising with the native women and scenes in the air command bunker with personnel moving tokens representing groups of aircraft round a large table.
Welshman Iwan Rheon (from Game Of Thrones) else makes a fairly convincing Polish lead, but the surprise outstanding performance comes from decidedly carnal, command bunker girl Stefanie Martini who spends much of her free time pursuing pilots including the Poles. “A few years ago, I’d have been called a tart, but today I’m just a good sport.” she says enthusiastically.
If the film doesn’t make a big thing of British racism, it’s present nonetheless. Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) celebrations are overshadowed by the British government’s swift moves to send the Poles back home following a survey claiming 56% of Brits wanted this. That’s set against other, less racist images when Jan (Rheon) is helped down from dangling by his parachute from a street lamp by an old couple who invite him into their home, discuss their own son’s death in the conflict then feed the airman a thick and tasty sandwich. If the British establishment doesn’t like Poles much, the ordinary Brits pictured here get on perfectly well with them.
That’s a far cry from some of the anti-foreigner sentiment and the ascendancy of the far-right seen in this country since the Referendum. The suggestion here that immigrants to Britain can make a valuable contribution is refreshing indeed in the current political climate.
Hurricane is out in the UK on Friday, September 7th. Watch the film trailer below:
Few sane people would disagree that the unexpected election of Donald Trump represents a social and political regression for the US and the world. Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief isn’t just a dangerous egomaniac warmonger and a misogynist; he’s also an outspoken xenophobe and racist. His ambiguous and grudging condemnation of the Charlottesville neo-Nazi is the icing in the cake for white supremacists. They are feeling very empowered right now, having the most powerful man in the world on their side.
But there’s also bad news for these white supremacists and racists altogether: cinema hasn’t and it will not cower to bigotry. DMovies has seen a very large number of powerful films coming from the US in the past 12 months or so and denouncing racism loud and clear. In fact, the majority of these films were being made before Trump was elected, suggesting that this might be just the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger movement to follow.
There are fiery documentaries about Civil Rights activists, the Ferguson riots and the Lovings, a blockbuster about the Algiers incident, two racially-charged horror movies and much more! The nine dirty gems below are listed alphabetically. Don’t forget to click on each individual film title in order to accede to our exclusive film review!
* The image at the top of the article is from an Afro-American woman yelling ‘Freedom’ when asked to shout so loud it could be heard all over the world during a Civil Rights March on Washington in August 1963. And the image just above if from the doc Whose Streets? (which is on the list below). Films can also send out screams across the planet!
person is shot every two hours and 45 minutes in Chicago. The rate is higher than the American soldiers death toll in Afghanistan and Iraq altogether. The title of Spike Lee’s new feature, Chi-raq, is a portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq, and a rapper’s nickname for the windy city. It is an artistic attempt to raise awareness of the tragedy in parts of the city, particularly the South Side. Afro-Americans are of course the most affected.
Spike Lee is a champion in the fight against racism towards black people. His films helped to catapult black rights in the United States decades ahead of other many other countries in the world.
The movie portrays the 1967 race riots of Detroit, focusing particularly on the Algiers Motel Incident in the evening of July 26th. The Incident should have been described as the “Massacre” instead. Following the report of a gunshot (which in reality came from a toy gun), the police invade the premises and hold the black guests plus two white females hostage for several hours. They consistently humiliate and sadistically torture the young men and women, and finally the succeed to kill some of them. They are convinced that Black people are criminals and therefore deserving of such treatment; they hardly hesitate before carrying out the horrendous actions.
You would hardly guess that this blockbuster was directed by a white woman, as Bigelow does wear the shoes of the “negroes”. Detroit does feel like a punch in the face of reactionary Americans, and a raging denunciation of an extremely brutal chapter in US history.
She’s white, he’s black, they’re urban, he needs to meet her parents who live in a house on a huge estate out of town. They find a pleasant white couple with black servants. The black servants appear to under some sort of mind control to make them more palatable to white people. The question now is: are they racist? This more or less sums up the plot of this racially-charged horror. Just be prepared for a major ugly twist at the end. Ugly as racism.
That inconvenient nigger is here to wreak havoc to your shady American freedom – I am not your Negro is a very provocative piece that uses incendiary language in order to inflame a deeply unequal, biased, hypocritical and racist society: the United States of America. The film will burst every myth of racial equality and democracy in the most powerful country in the world, and it’s an indispensable watch to all nationalities, races and creeds.
This documentary film by Raoul Peck is based on James Baldwin’s (pictured above) unfinished manuscript Remember This House and narrated by actor Samuel L. Jackson. It explores the history of racism in the US through Baldwin’s memories of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr, as well as their tragic and untimely death.
Also watch DMovies‘ editor Victor Fraga’s interview on Russia Today about I am not your Negro and racism:
At the age of 18, Mildred (Ruth Negga) fell in love and became pregnant with Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) in Caroline County, Virginia. Mildred was a person “of colour”, while Richard was white. In June 1958, the couple traveled to Washington, D.C. in order to get married, thereby evading Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made marriage between whites and non-whites a crime punishable by law.
hey were eventually arrested and sentenced to one year in prison, suspended for 25 years under the condition that they abandoned the state immediately. So they left their families behind and promptly moved to Washington DC. They were arrested again when they returned to Virginia so that Mildred could give birth to her first child at home. This real story is certain to move you profoundly.
Moonlight tells the story of a black male named Chiron at three stages of his life: childhood, adolescence and adulthood (played by a different actor at each stage). He is constantly seeking maternal love and affection, but his mother constantly shuns him in favour of her drug addiction. He ironically finds solace with a local drug dealer, who becomes a provisional father figure to the young black boy. He learns from him that his mother is his client and also, more significantly, the meaning of the word “faggot”. “It is a word to make gay people feel bad about themselves”, the unexpectedly gentle and caring man explains.
Moonlight isn’t just about racism, but also about homophobia and intersectionality. Having snatched the Best Picture Oscar, the film has become a landmark in the fight against bigotry for both Blacks and LGBT people.
Quest is a touching and sobering Dogwoof doc about Christopher “Quest” Rainey, his wife Christine’a “Ma Quest”, their daughter Patricia “PJ” and other relatives, friends and associates who live in North Philadelphia. They host a music studio at home, voicing local artists and providing a sense of identity to the community. Along their way, they have to face up a number of crises, including extreme violence, cancer and addiction. Very significantly, the documentarist Jonathan Olshefski follows the footsteps of the family roughly during the eight Obama years.
Sadly, the average Afro-American family faces problems, to which many white people are either alien or oblivious. A rapper in the movie rhymes it succinctly: “Racism still lives in the days, just in different ways”.
This is the perhaos least explosive film on the list, with a far more gentle and subtle – and yet conspicuous – anti-racist message. Milo (Eric Ruffin) is a young teenager living at a bottom of the social ladder on a housing estate in New York. He’s obsessed with vampires. He kills people and drinks their blood. He’s also a loner taunted by a gang of bullies. Sizing up likely prey, he makes friends with potential victim, a white girl named Sophie (Chloe Levine). At home, Milo lives with his former soldier elder brother Lewis (Aaron Clifton Moten), their mother having committed suicide some time previously.
The film deals with race in the sense that many of the housing estate residents including Milo and his family are black, and white people visit thinking they can buy drugs off dealers on the estate. But equally, Sophie is white: perhaps this is a consideration when Milo first stalks her, but it quickly becomes apparent to both him and us that she’s just as much an unloved and struggling teenager as he is.
This energetic documentary by the activist and filmmaker Sabaah Folayan shows the inconvenient truth behind the dramatic scenes that took place in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. An African American unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, was killed by police and left lying on the street for hours, despite the many witnesses and a CCTV camera just around the the corner.
The Black vigilantes decide to become their own keepers, since the police was not doing their work, plus often disrespecting the Constitution. The protests include riots, arson and speaking up words of anger in front of troops armed with tear gas grenades, guns and sniffing dogs.
Race and gender identity have become central topics in the world of cinema. The BFI has introduced diversity standards and even the Oscars are making visible efforts to become more inclusive of people of different colours and sexualities. The Best Picture Award for Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight is a testament of this, as is a related initiative to make membership more inclusive. These are all positive developments. So is it fair to say that anything goes in the fight for diversity?
Blackface became a no-go at least 20 years ago, and its racist origins are a perfectly reasonable justification. Such grotesque makeup was historically used in order to ridicule Black people, and to perpetuate the notion that they were primitive and less intelligent. It served well the myth of racial superiority upon which British Imperialism was founded, but it has no place in the 21st century. This practice should be confined to the museums and films archives only. The image above was taken from The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), a film often remembered for being the first spoken picture in history but also conveniently forgotten for its racist connotations.
But what about yellowface? What about transface? What if the purpose is to celebrate certain minorities instead of mocking them? Is this acceptable? Scarlett Johansson was controversially cast to play a Japanese woman in Rupert Sander’s Ghost in a Shell (pictured above), which was out in the UK earlier this year. Meanwhile in France, cis actress Fanny Ardent was chosen to play the transsexual Lola Pater in the eponymous film by Nadir Moknèche (pictured below). Are these representations ok?
The answer is no. They too are offensive. Some representations are celebratory in intention yet degrading in nature. Just because one claims that they meant good this does not give them a mandate to represent anyone they wish. Firstly because the mockery could be subliminal. Secondly, even if they had the purest of intentions deep in their heart, their subconscious could be infested with clichés and misrepresentations, which only those affected are able to recognise. The outcome of yellowface and transface can be both toxic and patronising, just like blackface. Plus it prevents real trans and oriental actors from obtaining work.
So am I saying that we shouldn’t change anyone in front of the cameras, that makeup is entirely forbidden and that we should stick strictly to our everyday look when appearing in a film? Again, the answer is no. Cinema is entitled to celebrate transformation, metamorphosis, and this is in the very nature of the seventh art. The problem of course is: where do you draw the line between what’s acceptable and excusable in the name of art and what’s counterproductive in the battle towards inclusion and diversity?
In the name of art
There should be a poetic licence or a very subversive artistic statement for transface, blackface and yellowface, otherwise it’s not acceptable at all.
For example, Almodóvar has used cis actress Carmen Maura to play a transsexual and trans actress Bibi Andersen to play a cis woman. He has used such subversive devices in various of his films. He’s not mocking transsexuality but instead our shallow notions of identity. It’s as if he was saying: look, transgender/sexual people are fabulous; it’s us who deserve to be mocked for our inability to distinguish between gender and sexuality. And there are also films where people change their gender halfway through, such as Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992).
Well, the issue of race isn’t as black and white, forgive the pun. I cannot think of a film where the character changes his race halfway throughout*. And they haven’t made a film about Michael Jackson’s “whiteface” yet. Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) could be perceived as some sort of “whiteface by proxy”, where the lead conceals her black roots in order to gain social acceptance in the US (pictured below). But this is not the same dirty and subversive device used by Almodóvar and Potter. There is no poetic licence. Sirk is instead making a very straightforward and even didactic anti-racist statement – and also a very effective one.
It is acceptable to use blackface and yellowface in cinema in order to discuss or mock the practices themselves, but not in an attempt to represent these minorities. I am yet to see a filmmaker that does that does that effectively, in the same way Almodóvar did it for gender representation.
So, what’s the limit?
We want race and gender representation to be taken seriously, and yet we don’t want to live in a PC-gone-mad world. So, how do we reconcile the two? Of course that’s not an easy task, and discussion will continue to flourish – thankfully so.
So do we stop young people from playing older characters? And do we prevent actors from delivering performances in a non-native language?I have a profound dislike of “languageface” and I also not very fond of people playing a character of e very different age. Again, unless the character changes in the movie (and, unlike race, our age DOES change) or there is a subversive twist/ poetic licence attached. But that’s just my personal taste, and at least I don’t think such representations are offensive. Instead, they are just silly.
In a nutshell, race and gender identity is where we should draw the line. It’s ok to represent people of a different age, language and culture, but it is NOT ok to represent people with a different race and gender identity. Bar the two caveats already discussed.
There is however one exception I am prepared to make. We should embrace every opportunity to do orangeface, therefore mocking and ridiculing Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief’s very natural colour. I hope a filmmaker will do that soon, and John Waters has already hinted that this might be possible, in his exclusive interview with DMovies. There is no shame in doing that. In the name of tolerance, we should claim the right NOT to tolerate intolerance, and Donald Trump is the epitome of intolerance. So let’s all get our orange paint out and encourage the most grotesque representation ever in the history of cinema!
* Since this piece was written our very avid readers have noted at least three films where characters undergo “racial transformation”: the Brazilian classic Macunaíma (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1969), True Identity (Charles Lane, 1991) and Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2008). This is called race-bending. Plenty of dirty material for yet another article!
Despite widespread international skepticism and disappointment, the Obama years conveyed a message of hope to many Americans, particularly those confined to neglected suburbia and with a colour of skin that did not bestow racial privilege upon them. Obama meant that such people felt represented for the first time and, in spite of his many shortcomings, this poignant symbolism will never die.
Quest is a touching and sobering doc about Christopher “Quest” Rainey, his wife Christine’a “Ma Quest”, their daughter Patricia “PJ” and other relatives, friends and associates who live in North Philadelphia. They host a music studio at home, voicing local artists and providing a sense of identity to the community. Along their way, they have to face up a number of crises, including extreme violence, cancer and addiction. Very significantly, the documentarist Jonathan Olshefski follows the footsteps of the family roughly during the eight Obama years.
A message of love, altruism and tenderness prevails throughout the movie, which fits in very well with Obama’s message of hope. This would sound very clichéd if it was a average white American family leading a life more or less comfortable, mostly devoid of violence, racial stigma and deprivation. Sadly, the average Afro-American family faces problems, to which many white people are either alien or oblivious. A rapper in the movie rhymes it succinctly: “Racism still lives in the days, just in different ways”.
The discreet charm of peripheral Philadelphia is conspicuous, debunking the myth that poverty is grey. In reality, these suburbs are far more vivid and vibrant than their wealthier counterparts. The bourdeaux-hued bricks of the buildings, the verdant weed on the pavement and the colourful clothes create a energetic and inspiring atmosphere. These people lead a meaningful and even contagious existence, against all odds.
One of the most powerful moments of the movie is the aftermath of PJ being hit by a stray bullet in the eye, which she eventually loses. She apologises to her father for something that’s clearly not her fault, revealing a toxic inversion of values in American society. There is a tacit belief that Black people are always to blame for whatever happens to them, however absurd it may be. Racism is still deeply ingrained everywhere, and this is a very difficult conversation for Black parents to have with their children, Quest being no exception. A controversial advert by Procter & Gamble recently touched on this issue.
More than once, Black people in the doc are confronted by the police. They deal with the situation with enormous calm and casualty, suggesting that they are used to racial profiling. Most white people wouldn’t act in the same way. Police violence against Blacks is obviously not confined to Philadelphia. Spike Lee portrayed a similar phenomenon in Chicago in Chi-raq (2016) and Kathryn Bigelow’s upcoming Detroit (very dirty review to follow very shortly).
Quest is described as a vérité documentary about an Afro-American family, and it succeeds in both its realism and message of hope at the face of adversity. Yet it’s nothing remotely close to the raw and naturalistic cinéma-vérité of the late Jean Rouch, nor does it possess the lyrical mastery of Alma Har’el’s recent American family doc LoveTrue (2017). It’s stuck somewhere between the two, and it gets a little laborious halfway through its 106 minutes.
The film soundtrack deserves to be mentioned, with a creative score of screechy pangs and ethereal chords throghout. The closing song is particularly touching, and makes me wish it was played more extensively during the film
Quest is out in selected cinemas and VoD in the UK on August 18th. Below is an interview with the filmmaker Jonathan Olshefskiand various of the members of the Rainey family.
We’re not even halfway through the year and we have already seen a significant number of horror movies either directed by women or dealing with the subject of racism, both of which are rather uncommon phenomena. Is this a one-off, a random coincidence or is the horror genre beginning to morph into something else, and tread into new territories?
First of all, allow me excuse myself for calling women a “minority”. While I recognise that the ladies outnumber the gents both in the UK and worldwide, I need to point out that sadly they are still a minority when it comes to filmmaking. A study commissioned by the professional association Directors UK last year revealed that only 13.6% of film directors working in the UK are women. There are no worldwide figures, but I would hazard a guess based on my very own anecdotal observation that the overall percentage of female directors across the globe is still single-digit. That’s why it’s not irrelevant that three of dirtiest horror films made this year were directed by very talented and young ladies.
There are also two dirty movies this year dealing with the subject of racism, and drawing direct comparisons between evil and bigotry – also mostly uncharted territory in the cinema world. Typically in horror, black people are either the first victim or the villain. Or both – such as Geretta Geretta’s character Rosemary (pictured at the top) in Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985).
I remember George A. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead making a subtle yet very poignant statement against racial discrimination when at the very end of the movie the only non-infected human, who also happens to be black (played by Duane Jones, pictured above), is unexpectedly killed by military forces in some sort of preventative measure. It’s as if Romero was telling us that our society was not ready to embrace a black hero. I can’t remember any other films since making a similar statement. Until these two movies this year decided to portray black people as victims of racism, and to use horror as an allegory of the prejudice that they face.
My memory and my knowledge might be failing me, so please feel free to add more to the list. And let’s all hope that horror is breaking away from dungeons of formulaic and conventional filmmaking, that new subgenres are being established and that these “minorities” are finally being given the opportunity to scream out their anguish and their tortured thoughts!
Either way, let’s remember these five “minority” horror movies made in 2017. Just click on the film titles in order to accede to our dirty movie review!
British filmmaker Alice Lowe popped out a strange blend of comedy and slasher dealing with pregnancy and a bloodthirsty unborn child. Her directorial and writing debut uses the horror genre as a vice to explore femininity and isolation. Unlike numerous egotistical star driven directorial debuts, Prevenge is a strange concoction of the slasher horror and comedy genres – making for a truly original recipe of British independent filmmaking.
Lowe’s straight-faced performance is all the more impressive when considering the actress was seven months pregnant when filming the role. Her ability to create awkwardness in a scene lends itself well to her script-writing.
Raw tells the story of 16-year-old Justine (Garance Marillier), who arrives for her first year in veterinary school somewhere in provincial France. She comes from a family of strict vegetarians, and she has never eaten meat herself, but she’s then forced to consume rabbits kidneys during an initiation ritual.
You will soon realise that this is not a male-made film. Justine is, in fact, quite sweet and likable; she’s no rabid beast. Plus the female gaze behind the camera makes this a less exploitative and voyeuristic movie.
This is like Roman Polanski from a female gaze. Australian director Cate Shortland director one of dirtiest and most arresting films of the year. It will keep you on the edge of your seat for about two thirds of the action. A truly disturbing tale of male obsession and violence towards women (in the shape of a kidnap), and the the disturbing façade of normality attached to it, set in the trendy and yet bleak and cold German capital.
The dirtiest aspect of Berlin Syndrome is that, unlike in the syndrome named after the Swedish capital, the victim here does not gradually begin to identify with her kidnapper. The frail and vulnerable female portrayed by Teresa Palmer here defies all expectations and instead morphs into a headstrong escapee.
She’s white, he’s black, they’re urban, he needs to meet her parents who live in a house on a huge estate out of town. His question: are her folks racist? The mixed-race couple go out to meet her parents and find a pleasant white couple with black servants. The black servants appear to under some sort of mind control to make them more palatable to white people.
It’s a very good cast, particularly British-born Daniel Kaluuya as the male lead and veteran actress Catherine Keener as the mother. The film does have its shortcomings, but the message is loud and clear: racism is just plain horrific!
American filmmaker Michael O’Shea, who’s not black, created an extraordinary portrait of teen angst, framed by the character of a boy obsessed in a bleak and soulless housing estate in New York. Milo (Eric Ruffin) is a young teenager living at a bottom of the social ladder on a housing estate in New York. He’s obsessed with vampires. He kills people and drinks their blood. He’s also a loner taunted by a gang of bullies. Sizing up likely prey, he makes friends with potential victim Sophie (Chloe Levine).
The film deals with race in the sense that many of the housing estate residents including Milo and his family are black, and white people visit thinking they can buy drugs off dealers on the estate. But equally, Sophie is white: perhaps this is a consideration when Milo first stalks her, but it quickly becomes apparent to both him and us that she’s just as much an unloved and struggling teenager as he is.
