Monthly Archives: March 2021

  • Firebird

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peeter Rebane (2021)

    In 1977, on a military base in Soviet-occupied Estonia, a cadet falls in love with a dashing fighter pilot.  At the start of Firebird, Sergey (Tom Prior) is in a tentative romance with Luisa (Diana Podharskaya), secretary to the base commander, Kuznetsov (Nicholas Woodeson), and counting the days to the end of his national service.  The arrival on the scene of Lieutenant Roman Medveyev (Oleg Zagorodnii) changes all that.  He and Sergey are initially drawn to together by a shared interest in photography and theatre.  Sergey has never been to the ballet; Roman has an exeat to see The Firebird.  He arranges for Sergey to drive him there and watch the show.  The intensely vivid colours on the stage contrast gorgeously with the thoroughgoing greyness of the Cold War-era military base.  On the way back from the theatre, the physical relationship between Sergey and Roman begins.   Homosexuality in the Soviet Union armed forces was illegal.  Roman, all set for a doubly high-flying military career, is nervous of being found out, especially once an anonymous letter comes into the possession of hostile, inquisitive Major Zverev (Margus Prangel).

    Sergey had intended, after military service, to return home to work on his widowed mother’s small farm.  Instead, with Roman’s encouragement, he applies successfully for a place at a prestigious Moscow drama school.  By 1979, he’s flourishing there but is shocked by Luisa’s news when she comes to visit:  she and Roman are to be married and she’s pregnant with his child.  The second half of the film takes place in the early 1980s.  Sergey is about to graduate; Roman, on a temporary posting to Moscow, takes an apartment there, leaving his wife and their young son back in Estonia.  The affair between Sergey and Roman resumes.  When Luisa arrives to celebrate New Year with her husband they and Sergey mark the occasion together, at what proves to be a last supper.  Sensitive to his lover’s divided feelings, Sergey departs next morning, leaving a note that tells Roman their relationship is over.  Luisa reads the note before her husband has chance to do so.  She returns to Estonia and Roman joins the Soviet invasion forces in Afghanistan, where he’s killed in action.  In the film’s closing sequence, Sergey is back in a theatre (and conspicuous in a distracting way:  he wears a DJ and black tie – unlike any of the other men glimpsed in the audience).  With tears in his eyes, he’s watching the same Stravinsky ballet that marked the start of his and Roman’s romance.

    Firebird, receiving its world premiere at this year’s (online) BFI Flare festival, is the first dramatic feature by Peeter Rebane, who has previously directed pop videos and TV shows, and the documentary Tashi Delek! (2015).  He and Tom Prior also produced (with Brigita Rozenbrika) and wrote the screenplay, based on The Story of Roman, a memoir by the Russian actor Sergey Fetisov (who died in 2017).  Rebane is Estonian, as is much of the cast, though Oleg Zagorodnii is Ukrainian and Diana Podharskaya is Russian.  Yet the dialogue is in English – I guess because the lead actor is British and/or Firebird means to make its mark in the Anglophone market.  The non-native speakers of English aren’t all equally comfortable with their lines but this isn’t a big issue.  Prior and Nicholas Woodeson (an experienced screen East European – Borgen, The Death of Stalin) speak lightly accented English, which helps unify the sound of the film’s voices.

    This absorbing film has real merits but it must be said that it features more plot clichés than surprises.  Although the visual leitmotifs are well worked out (and well photographed, by Mait Mäekivi), the ideas underlying them are very familiar.  The pelagic imagery is the standout example.  In a prologue, fragments of which replay in Sergey’s mind at subsequent points, two pre-adolescent boys swim underwater.  In the opening scene proper, Sergey, Luisa and their friend Volodja (Jake Henderson), another cadet, have made an unauthorised excursion from the air base to go swimming – the emphasis, for Sergey anyway, seems to be on holding his breath underwater for as long as possible.  Sergey and Roman swim and make love in the sea on the night of The Firebird:  the sequence climaxes (the only word for it) almost comically, with a shot of two fighter jets soaring overhead.  On a later, otherwise idyllic seaside trip together, Sergey reveals to Roman that his best friend in childhood drowned at the age of thirteen, in light of the boy’s father’s reaction to his son’s incipient gayness.  By now, Peeter Rebane’s illustrations of forbidden sexual feelings putting you in deep water are getting a bit much.

    For as long as the action is focused on the military base, the main characters’ predicament is plain.  Extravagantly homophobic insults directed at Sergey and his fellow cadets, in the disciplinary rants of their psycho supervisor (Kaspar Velberg), convey the taken-as-read impossibility of actual same-sex activities in this environment.  The supervisor abuses his charges as ‘fags’ etc not because he thinks they are but because these are the most insulting terms he can think to use.  Once the narrative moves on to Moscow, however, it loses clarity – especially regarding Sergey’s relationships at the drama school.   He’s a leading light of his year, attracts students of both sexes but is disengaged from the other students.  Rebane may mean to suggest that, because of his devotion to Roman, Sergey lives like a monk while they’re apart but it’s hard to accept that interested parties in this community would know to leave Sergey alone.  Masha (Ester Kuntu), who fancies him, also recognises that he’s committed to his studies (she says he always has his nose in a book).  Yet Ester Kuntu’s warmth and sparky curiosity in the role make it hard to believe that Masha wouldn’t be determined to find out more about Sergey.

    Roman and Luisa’s wedding breakfast is held at the air base.  All Roman’s colleagues, even the piggish Zverev, are in attendance; the bride and groom’s families are noticeably absent; the only civilian present is Sergey, despite his unhappy feelings about the marriage.  He appears to have accepted an invitation in order to seduce Roman when they briefly leave the dining room and that Zverev can then again try and fail to catch them in flagrante delicto.  The best moment of this mostly unconvincing episode comes in Colonel Kuznetsov’s remark that he understands how Sergey must feel seeing Roman and Luisa together.  ‘I knew what was going on under my nose’, says the colonel and Sergey freezes.  ‘Yes,’ Kuznetsov continues, ‘if he hadn’t come along, she would have married you’.

    Once Roman is in Moscow and Sergey moves in with him, the scenes between them are fine.  A party in the apartment, however, where the guests are other military officers and drama school students, made no sense to me:  aren’t Sergey and Roman both intent on keeping their private lives just that?  There are good bits here.  The cultural confusion of Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’ playing at a party in Moscow is funny.  Volodja opens a door to find Sergey and Roman inside, in each other’s arms:  after the extended suspense of sequences where the pair avoids detection by Zverev, the suddenness of this is effective.  But Volodja makes the discovery only so that he can then reveal to Sergey that he wrote the poison pen letter about Roman’s sexual preferences which triggered Zverev’s mission to discredit him.  It’s also puzzling that the always apprehensive Roman isn’t more anxious about the consequences of Volodja’s discovery – and, indeed, that there don’t seem to be any consequences.

    Tom Prior is thirty but looks younger, passing easily for a fresh-faced cadet and someone of normal student age.  Prior gives a decent performance but, in such a big role, doesn’t show enough range to avoid becoming repetitive.  The two other faces of the film’s love triangle are more compelling.  Diana Podharskaya is emotionally fluid; she impresses despite an underwritten part.  Oleg Zagorodnii, with his chiselled features and penetrating eyes, cuts an imposing figure.  He makes you think Firebird would have been better as (and as per Sergey Fetisov’s title) the story of Roman, who is subject to stronger pressures than Sergey to conform and conceal, and always ambivalent.  One of the dramatic highlights is the immediate aftermath to a dangerous flying mission that Roman is lucky, and knows he’s lucky, to survive.  Sergey seeks him out to check he’s OK, Roman, in that moment, is ready to throw emotional caution aside.  This close shave, in retrospect, foreshadows of Roman’s death in action, which has another aspect too.  His departure for Afghanistan, soon after Luisa’s discovery of his affair with Sergey, has the quality of a suicide mission:  Roman feels his sexuality leaves him nowhere to go.

    After learning of his death, Sergey pays a call on Luisa and her child – an affecting scene thanks to the trio’s mess of unhappy feelings.  The fatherless son (uncredited on IMDb) is particularly expressive, though he looks considerably older than the three-year-old I thought he was meant to be.  But neither this scene nor Sergey’s return visit to The Firebird is quite the film’s last word.  Concluding text notes that Estonia, on regaining its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, espoused more liberal approaches to same-sex relationships; but that recent years have seen a sharp regression in Russian attitudes to gay men in the military.  Peeter Rebane plays his final card unusually late.  Right at the end of the closing credits, the unlovely Major Zverev returns to view.  His is the face on the screen immediately before it goes dark.

    18 March 2021

  • Judas and the Black Messiah

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Shaka King (2021)

    The day after I watched it, Judas and the Black Messiah made Oscars history of a peculiar kind.  Among its six nominations, both leads – Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield – received Supporting Actor nods for their work.  Who were they supporting?  The day after that, I read a Sight & Sound (March 2021) feature on Shaka King’s movie.  Views and comments attributed to King in that piece suggest he’ll derive particular satisfaction from the categorisation of Kaluuya’s and Stanfield’s performances, daft as it is.  The Messiah of the title is Fred Hampton, the exceptionally young and charismatic chairman of the Black Panther party in Chicago, who was shot dead, at the age of twenty-one, during a police raid on his apartment in December 1969.   Among Hampton’s best-known pronouncements is that ‘you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism’.  According to the S&S article, Shaka King ‘admits to some discomfort with the film’s title, for the way it suggests a more traditional biopic focus on Hampton [Kaluuya] and his antagonist William O’Neal [Stanfield], an informant for the FBI’.  Does King see Academy voters’ failure to spot any lead performers as proof of his success in reflecting, through the film he’s made, Fred Hampton’s collectivism?

    King opens with a scene-setting montage of news film and sixties pop music.  Worked into this is mock-archive footage of J Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen), warning of the dangers posed by the Black Panthers and, in particular, the rise of a ‘black messiah’.  There’s also a simulated clip from William O’Neal’s only screen interview, for an episode in the second series of Henry Hampton’s TV documentary Eyes on the Prize, recorded in 1989.  This leads into the narrative proper, which starts by describing how O’Neal, a car thief on the West Side of Chicago, came to work for the FBI.  His criminal technique includes claiming to be a law officer and telling a car owner their car is logged as a stolen vehicle (this supposedly makes the owner more likely to hand over their car keys).  In late 1968, O’Neal is arrested during an attempted theft.  Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), the FBI agent who questions him in custody, gives O’Neal the choice between a jail sentence (eighteen months for stealing a car, five years for impersonating a police officer) and infiltrating the Chicago Black Panthers, working undercover for the FBI as part of its Cointelpro activities.

    The narrative that follows, which climaxes in Hampton’s death from police bullets a short while after O’Neal has drugged his drink, is absorbing but rarely penetrating.  King, who wrote the screenplay with Will Berson, Keith Lucas and Kenny Lucas, tells Nicholas Russell in S&S that:  ‘We ended up having to sacrifice a lot of characters, a lot of storylines, just to get this entire story in there’.  Even with those sacrifices, Judas and the Black Messiah favours breadth of focus at the expense of depth.  There are individually strong sequences:  a well-staged shootout with police at the Black Panther Party (BPP) offices; an interview in which Hoover, with quiet menace, reminds Mitchell (Jesse Plemons is, as usual, excellent) of white America’s moral duty to subdue Black Power.  King shows how Fred Hampton’s exceptional oratory enabled him to form a ‘Rainbow Coalition’ with other marginalised local communities, including, most remarkably, a working-class white group who fly the Confederate Flag at their rallies.  An episode concerning George Sams (Terayle Hill), hiding out at the BPP offices after killing a suspected FBI plant in the organisation, takes the viewer, as well as O’Neal, by surprise when Mitchell explains that it’s Sams who’s the real FBI informant.  Yet the film fails, thanks to shallow direction, to create a sense of persisting unease and suspicion among the Panthers about spies in their midst.

    A subplot involving the killing of a young Panther called Jimmy Palmer (Ashton Sanders), which lacks impact because Palmer hasn’t appeared enough to register as an individual, is typical of a major weakness of the film:  King’s ‘democratic’ approach to drama turns out to mean spreading himself thin.  He’s right the title is questionable but only because the implied equal billing for O’Neal and Hampton is misleading.  It may be fairly accurate in terms of screen time but O’Neal is a sketchy conception.  The S&S feature also includes interviews with Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield.  When he was sent the script Stanfield assumed that King wanted him to play Fred Hampton; when he learned otherwise he re-read the script and ‘realised there was an opportunity to explore something interesting’.  Stanfield’s words don’t quite conceal his disappointment at not being offered the better role but he gamely describes trying, despite his feelings about what O’Neal did, to ‘connect with his humanity’.  He was fighting a losing battle, though.

    O’Neal is as underwritten a character as his biblical progenitor.  The film reveals nothing about his personal life outside the job he’s doing for the FBI.  There’s little indication of how his feelings about that job are developing, even when he tries (and fails) to quit as an informant.   While Hampton is in prison (on verging-on-comical charges of assaulting an ice-cream truck driver, stealing ice creams and giving them to children in the street), O’Neal rises through the BPP ranks.  There’s a good bit, after the Party offices have been torched, when he supervises repairs to the building.  Here, Stanfield is able to hint that O’Neal wants to be a genuine contributor to the movement.  That doesn’t come through, however, in a more crucial scene.  Mitchell, posing as one of the white Rainbow Coalition members, attends one of Hampton’s rallies.  He watches O’Neal’s reactions and afterwards gives him a warning, claiming he can see that O’Neal has been won over by Hampton’s rhetoric.  That’s not what comes through the screen at all:  O’Neal just looks miserably anxious.  Because the script doesn’t him enough to work with, LaKeith Stanfield lets his face give away too much – usually that O’Neal’s scared of being found out.

    That the actor playing O’Neal is forced to make the best of a bad job doesn’t matter to Nicholas Russell, whose S&S piece is always woke, sometimes intemperate and occasionally incomprehensible (King’s film’s ‘power is in depicting the everyday dangers and struggles of Black radicals and organisers, in sitting between those moments in stillness, and in imagining the Black political biopic as something that exists beyond condescension towards different modes of Black life’).  Russell is bluntly dismissive of William O’Neal as ‘cowardly’ and ‘selfish’.  He mentions O’Neal’s being ‘coerced into informing’ without a glimmer of sympathy for his predicament.  He seems to think a desperate African-American teenage lawbreaker should simply have known better than to betray the Black Panther cause.

    The casting of both main roles muffles an important aspect of the true story:  how very young both protagonists were.  LaKeith Stanfield was twenty-eight when the film was made, William O’Neal still a teenager when recruited by the FBI.  The age difference detracts from a sense of O’Neal’s exploitability.  (It also makes you wonder about the historical accuracy of other details.  If O’Neal was only nineteen when he started working undercover, it’s hard to believe that, when he was stealing cars, their drivers believed he was the police officer he claimed to be.)  Daniel Kaluuya was thirty at the time of the shoot, nine years older than Fred Hampton was when he died.   This makes it harder to appreciate fully Hampton’s extraordinarily precocious skills as a political organiser and performer.

    In every other sense, however, Kaluuya is most impressive.  He gives Hampton’s oratory a distinctive and compelling rhythm and power, which are further enhanced by Sean Bobbitt’s dynamic cinematography.  In private, Kaluuya has a different intensity.  This comes through in the increasingly tender scenes between Hampton and his girlfriend and fellow activist Deborah Johnson (well played by Dominique Fishback), and when he’s drinking tea in the kitchen of a woman (Alysia Joy Powell) whose Panther son has recently been killed.  On the public platform, Kaluuya’s body has an electrifying tension.  This makes his relaxation in Deborah’s company all the more expressive.

    Nicholas Russell notes that the film, unlike traditional biopics of Civil Rights pioneers, has ‘no stirring fades to black as large crowds chant for freedom’ and that ‘If you’re unfamiliar with the Black Panther Party’s core tenets, its key leadership figures or Cointelpro …, there’s no title card to explain things for you’.  Shaka King tells Russell he resisted studio pressure to ‘contextualise things’ because ‘For me, though, it was the idea of contextualising the conditions that the Black Panthers were fighting against.  It’s the same conditions we’re fighting against now, you know?’  I’m not sure what exactly the first part of that quote means but the second part is revealing.

    In limiting the historically specific details, King blurs the difference between the Panthers and Black Lives Matter as if to suggest a virtually common manifesto.  On the face of it, this doesn’t seem to make sense.  Fred Hampton speaks an unequivocal political language.  There may be no crowds in the film chanting freedom; there is a crowd to take up Hampton’s percussive, insistent chant, ‘I am a revolutionary!’  Is BLM really seen as a revolutionary movement, except by its benighted antagonists or in the sense of promoting a ‘revolution’ in the attitudes that underlie racially motivated violence?  Yet Shaka King’s more extravagant remarks to S&S – such as his assertion that centrist ‘inaction contributes to Black people’s demise just as much as’ the action of the white supremacist murderer Dylann Roof – give the strong impression that he personally doesn’t distinguish BPP and BLM conceptions of changing the status quo.

    There may not be detailed signposting of the kind Nicholas Russell has in mind at the start of Judas and the Black Messiah but there’s a lot of explanatory text on screen at the end, as well as, needless to say, archive footage of the real Fred Hampton and William O’Neal – the latter in the real version of his Eyes on the Prize interview.  This aired in late January 1990, a few days after O’Neal had taken his own life.  Twenty years after Fred Hampton’s death, O’Neal’s face in interview wears a closed-off yet haunted look.  What he says suggests a still conflicted man.  Of course the politically engaged makers of this film weren’t interested in exploring that conflict but I think ignoring it amounts to an oversight in a piece of social commentary, as well as a wasted dramatic opportunity.  Having Judas firmly in the forefront might even have helped the Academy’s actors branch realise there was a lead actor in the movie.

    14 March 2021

     

     

     

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