Monthly Archives: November 2022

  • Till

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Chinonye Chukwu (2022)

    I began the 2019 London Film Festival (LFF) by watching Chinonye Chukwu’s debut feature, Clemency.  I ended this year’s LFF with Chukwu’s second feature, Till.  That this is a stronger film than Clemency is down to what Till is about rather than how it’s been made.  Its true story is gripping, thanks to the inherent power of the notorious subject matter, and to (some of) the acting, rather than to Chukwu’s directing choices.

    Born and raised in Chicago, Emmett Till was fourteen years old when, in August 1955, he went on holiday to Mississippi to stay with relatives.  It was the first time this African-American boy had been separated from his mother and single parent, Mamie, for any length of time.  Their relatives in the South lived just outside the little town of Money.  During a visit there with his cousins, Emmett entered a grocery store, where he spoke with the young, white, married proprietor, Carolyn Bryant.  He allegedly flirted with and wolf whistled at her.  A few nights after this, Bryant’s husband and his half-brother abducted the boy from his relatives’ home.  Emmett was tortured and shot through the head.  His mutilated body, ‘with a 75lb cotton gin fan tied around his neck by way of barbwired fencing’ (Wikipedia), was dumped in the Tallahatchie River, from where it was recovered three days later.  When Emmett’s body was returned to Chicago, his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket so that people could see for themselves what Jim Crow racist violence had done to her son.  Tens of thousands viewed the casket.  Photographs of the mutilated corpse were published in some newspapers and magazines.  In September 1955, Roy Bryant and J W Milam stood trial for murder in Sumner, Mississippi and were found not guilty by the all-white jury.  The case of Emmett Till was a catalyst for the Civil Rights movement for years after his murder.  Chinonye Chukwu’s film recounts these events and commemorates Mamie Till-Mobley (1921-2003), who became a prominent Civil Rights activist in the wake of her son’s death.

    This was one of several LFF screenings I attended this year with subtitles for the hard of hearing – helpful for me though the results were sometimes excessively conscientious:  we even got ‘fanfare’ during the Universal Pictures intro to Women Talking.  I don’t think that happened at the start of Till, though Universal is involved in its distribution too, but description of Abel Korzeniowski’s music came thick and fast on the screen over the next 130 minutes.  The music is intense, emotional, pensive, downcast (and downbeat), melancholy, and more.  The adjectives serve to underline that, if ever there was a film not needing music to keep cueing its audience what to feel, it’s Till.  Chukwu’s overuse of Korzeniowski’s score is typical of her direction and its sometimes counterproductive effects.

    The narrative begins shortly before the visit to Mississippi, when Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler) and Emmett (Jalyn Hall), who’s nicknamed ‘Bobo’, drive into central Chicago on a shopping trip.  Mamie, who works as a secretary, is assured, well dressed and drives her own car.  Her ladylike appearance gives extra nasty impact to the racism of a white floorwalker in a department store, who suggests Mamie might prefer to shop on a different floor (‘downstairs’).  She’s furious but composedly declines the invitation; Bobo is excited and oblivious to the exchange.  It’s an effective scene; so are parts of the next sequences, in the family home.  We’re introduced there to Mamie’s mother, Alma Carthan (Whoopi Goldberg), and Mamie’s fiancé, Gene Mobley (Sean Patrick Thomas).  (Mamie had already been married twice, first to Emmett’s late father, then to ‘Pink’ Bradley, whom she divorced after two years.)  Also in Chicago, on a visit to his family, is Mamie’s uncle, Moses Wright (John Douglas Thompson), a sharecropper and part-time minister in Mississippi; Bobo will be taking the train South with Uncle Moses and will stay at his house.  Mamie’s apprehension about her son’s trip away is understandable but Chukwu works it up into nearly obsessive worry.  It’s one example of her tendency to accentuate every element of her important story – with the result that crucial parts of it don’t stand out enough or, through awkward staging, don’t ring true.

    This is especially the case with the Mississippi scenes leading up to the murder.  In the days before his departure, Mamie has repeatedly told eager, flippant Bobo always to keep on the right side of white folk (‘be small’) and never to get separated from his cousins since they understand local codes of behaviour.  The big-city kid soon gets bored in rural Mississippi with nothing much to do except help his kin pick cotton.  You can believe Bobo might forget himself enough to wander alone into the Bryant store but Chukwu over-prepares the fateful encounter that took place there.  She builds tension between Bobo and Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett) deliberately.  By slowing things down and fixing on the woman’s hostile stare, she creates time and reason for the boy to call to mind his mother’s urgent instructions.  The wolf whistle, when it finally arrives, is considered.  What exactly took place in the grocery has continued to be a matter of dispute but it’s puzzling that Chukwu doesn’t take the opportunity to present it in a way that minimises provocative intention on Emmett’s part.  It’s been suggested, for example, that his whistle was a bit of showing off to other boys watching.  In Till, he and Carolyn Bryant are pretty well alone in the store.

    Roy Bryant (Sean Michael Weber) and Milam (Eric Whitten) arrive with guns late at night at the Wrights’ house and threaten to blast their way in unless ‘Preacher’ opens up.  This is a frightening sequence yet there’s little sense of the bewildering terror that Emmett Till must have felt as the intruders hauled him out of bed and drove him off.  The audience can only be grateful that Chukwu refrains from showing the assault on Bobo – cries of pain in the darkness are bad enough – but the aftermath to the abduction fails to convey what the Wrights are feeling.  Immediately after the grocery store incident, Chukwu makes a big deal of his cousins’ alarm as to what could happen as a consequence of Bobo’s ‘insulting’ Carolyn Bryant.  When their worst fears are realised the cousins (Gem Marc Collins and Diallo Thompson) don’t react nearly as much (and Chukwu doesn’t suggest this is because they’re numb with shock).   Moses and his wife, Elizabeth (Keisha Tillis), surely are horrified by the thought of what his kidnappers are liable to do to Bobo, and of what on earth they’ll say to Mamie.  This doesn’t come through either.

    When she receives the terrible news in Chicago, it’s hard even for Mamie to react enough, her alarm about the trip having been so exaggerated.  Chukwu is relatively uninterested in dramatising the mother’s protracted nightmare while she knows no more than that her son has disappeared.  The lead actress, as well as her character, is in suspense until Mamie learns that Bobo is dead and collapses in grief.  For Chukwu, Mamie is a tragic heroine whose ordeal must be shown as a series of visual highlights and outbursts of operatic intensity, and Danielle Deadwyler delivers a performance perfectly aligned to her director’s intentions.  Deadwyler (whom I’d not seen before) is beautiful and often compelling:  Mamie’s howls of pain at the sight of Bobo’s corpse are an astonishing and dreadful sound (the keening of Keisha Tillis, when Elizabeth confronts the open casket, is similarly impressive).  There were times, though, when I wished Deadwyler would stop acting her socks off and find quieter ways of expressing Mamie’s feelings – as Whoopi Goldberg, of all people, succeeds in doing as Alma.  Jalyn Hall, too, is excellent as Emmett in the Chicago scenes, as he sings along, word perfect, to songs on the car radio and TV commercial jingles:  you miss his exuberant presence when it disappears from the film.  But rather than try to capture ‘the godawful hush’ (Sylvia Plath) of his absence, Chukwu prefers to compose shots that aestheticise Mamie’s noble solitude.

    Chukwu shows admirable judgment, though, in the challenging sequences where Emmett’s body is seen, by his mother in a mortuary and by others in the casket.  The shots of various parts of the hideously bloated, discoloured corpse are shocking but discreet.  Chukwu rightly doesn’t make it easy for the viewer by leaving the boy’s appearance to our imagination yet the discretion feels respectful to Emmett‘s memory (and his mother’s).  It’s also striking, in this predominantly overemphatic film, that Chukwu’s illustrations of racist attitudes are mostly controlled – and more trenchant as a result.  The Chicago store floorwalker at the start succinctly makes the point that in mid-twentieth-century America apartheid thinking wasn’t confined to the South.  As Mamie approaches the courthouse in Sumner, she’s terrified by the sound of a gunshot close by; it’s actually the sound of a pop gun, fired by a white boy who chuckles with satisfaction at the effect he’s had.  Inside the courthouse, Mamie and her Black companions are on the receiving end of relaxed, automatic contempt and laughter, from court officials and spectators alike.  This is both instructive and makes the blood boil more than when actors overact racism.  When the judge bangs his gavel, Mamie, hearing an echo of the pop gun, is startled once more.

    It’s a pity such details are rare in Till.  More characteristically, Chukwu has Mamie, in the Wrights’ home, look at the letter that Bobo wrote her just before he was abducted (and which Uncle Moses insisted the boy should post first thing next morning).  Mamie reads and Danielle Deadwyler’s face tells us all we need to know but it’s not enough for Chinonye Chukwe, who cuts to a shot of the letter so that we can start reading too.  In Money, Mamie’s car stops outside the Bryant store.  The viewer has obviously been there before and realises what seeing the place must mean to her.  Chukwu, laying it on with a trowel, has Deadwyler say, ‘So this is where it happened …’ and then deliver a facial reaction.  Leading Civil Rights figures take an immediate interest in the case.  Mamie’s principal contact in Chicago is Rayfield Mooty (Kevin Carroll); Medgar Evers (Tosin Cole) escorts Mamie and her father (Frankie Faison) to the murder trial in Mississippi.  Tosin Cole’s well-judged playing of Medgar Evers is in contrast to the one scene that features Evers’s wife, Myrlie (Jayme Lawson) – a conversation between her and Mamie, in which Myrlie talks of her fears for her husband’s life.  Her lines are written so as to describe exactly how he really will meet his end.  Medgar Evers was shot dead by a white assassin in June 1963, in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

    The screenplay credit is shared by Chinonye Chukwu, Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp, himself a film-maker and best known for his work on and on behalf of Emmett Till.  According to Wikipedia, Beauchamp ‘began researching and writing for a documentary about the Till case in the late 1990s. He … worked closely with … Mamie Till-Mobley, who became a friend and mentor of his until her death …’  Beauchamp’s ‘research and advocacy led to the reopening of the Till case in 2004 which was closed again after finding no new evidence’.  His documentary, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, was released in 2005, since when Beauchamp has produced a series of documentaries about other ‘cold case’ Civil Rights-related homicides.  He is also one of the producers of Till (along with Whoopi Goldberg, his co-writer Michael Reilly, Barbara Broccoli and others).  It goes without saying that Keith Beauchamp is deeply invested in this film; that’s no doubt also true of others involved, the director included.   I admire and strongly sympathise with their commitment but there’s no point my pretending I think that’s enough to create satisfying film drama.

    The very end of Till confirms that the facts of the matter eclipse most of what Chinonye Chukwu has put on the screen.  What happened to Medgar Evers is summarised in closing legends, along with plenty more.  I already knew about Evers’s assassination but not about much else in these postscripts, which made them all the more appalling.  In 1956, Roy Bryant and J W Milam, in a lucrative interview with Look magazine, confessed to the murder:  double jeopardy ensured the pair couldn’t be retried and they remained free men for the rest of their lives.  Even though Emmett Till’s death gave impetus to a campaign to outlaw lynching, it didn’t become a federal hate crime for another sixty-six years.  The Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act was signed into law by President Biden in March 2022.

    16 October 2022

  • The Blue Caftan

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le bleu du caftan

    Maryam Touzani (2022)

    I’ve made some poor choices of what to see at this year’s London Film Festival but The Blue Caftan is an exception.  The films I’ve watched in the last nine days haven’t been short of admirable performances and Maryam Touzani’s drama features two more, in the lead roles.  But whereas other standout actors impressed despite shortcomings in the writing of their movie (Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry in Causeway, Olivia Colman and Tom Brooke in Empire of Light), Saleh Bakri and Luzna Azabal, who play husband and wife in The Blue Caftan, are blessed with a script, by Touzani and Nabil Ayouch, that is thought through and worked through.  The storyline keeps taking you by surprise.  The unexpected turns are dramatically and humanly convincing.

    Mina (Azabal) and Halim (Bakri) run a tailoring business – caftans a speciality – in the medina of the Moroccan city of Salé.  Halim, a maalem (presumably ‘master tailor’), learned his craft and inherited the store from his late father but Mina has been the driving force in the business and in the couple’s relationship.  It’s she who deals primarily with customers, with placing orders for fabric from merchants, and so on.  It was Mina, we later discover, who proposed marriage to the reserved, dignified Halim.  He’s a behind-the-scenes figure in the store, based in the small back room where he works on individual commissions for clients.  The film begins shortly after Youssef (Ayoub Missioui) has been taken on as Halim’s latest apprentice and at a time when Mina’s long-standing ill health is getting worse.  She has undergone repeated, expensive and unavailing treatments for cancer.   She usually leaves the store before her husband, returning to their apartment to prepare their evening meal.  To be more accurate, Halim’s evening meal:  Mina can rarely manage the rfissa or other dishes that she prepares.  She subsists on a diet of tangerines and morphine.

    Working cheek by jowl, Halim and Youssef say little but, from the start, exchange significant looks.  On his way home from work, Halim visits a public bathhouse (hammam) and has sex with another man in one of the cubicles there.  On his next visit there, Hamil’s cubicle partner is the man who hands out keys and soap at the entrance to the hammam.  The Blue Caftan’s destination seems obvious but the route taken is complex – thanks to Maryam Touzani’s interweaving of the sartorial and sexual aspects of the story, and her portrait of the central relationship.  Their union is childless and, although Halim and Mina share a bed, sexless now, except for the wife’s occasional vain attempts to arouse her husband.  Mina’s illness began with breast cancer:  the combination of a terminal disease that eats away at her female identity and a marital relationship that insults her womanhood sounds pat but the richness of the screenplay and acting transcends neat symbolic design.  We can see how, and therefore believe that, this marriage has lasted – through mutual affection, a shared interest in the business that consumes so much of the couple’s energies, the ability to make each other laugh.

    The interweaving mentioned above is achieved in images (the lucent cinematography is by Virginie Surdej) as well as in what the characters say and do.  We watch Halim at work and, in particular, the progress of the garment that gives the film its title:  the blue caftan is supposedly Halim’s most intricate and demanding commission to date, destined for a particularly pushy client.   Touzani also regularly punctuates the narrative with isolated shots of fabrics, braids and other decorative trimmings.    When, early on, Halim tells Mina he thinks the new trainee shows promise, she’s sceptical:  Youssef, she says, is from the wrong side of the tracks and, like apprentices they’ve had before, won’t stick around.  We’ve already picked up from their faces that Halim is attracted to Youssef and that Mina has noticed, which makes this brief conversation between husband and wife intriguingly ambiguous.  It’s as if Halim, at some level of his mind, is linking Youssef’s potential as a tailor and as a lover (this is the one …).  It’s as if Mina is compelled to remind Halim that Youssef isn’t the first of his kind.  This needn’t mean that Halim has had physical relationships with other apprentices; it does imply that he has wanted them (and that his wife knows this).

    One evening, when Mina and Halim unusually leave the store at the same time, she asks to accompany him to a café in the medina that she knows he frequents.  She tells him she’s wanted to go there for ages.  The café isn’t another part of his homosexual life but Halim’s unease as he and Mina sit together there is because the clientele appears to be men only.  There’s a football international on the café’s television:  Halim’s discomfort is increased, though he also manages to see the funny side, when Mina cheers a goal scored by the wrong team.  She doesn’t meekly submit to either her cancer or her husband’s sexuality but The Blue Caftan dramatises Mina’s growing recognition that illness is making it impossible for her to run the business and will, in time, mean she can no longer keep watch on Halim.  When a roll of expensive pink fabric goes missing, she accuses Youssef of stealing it, which prompts him to quit (as Mina predicted he would).  When Mina is too ill for work most days and Halim is spending more time at home to care for her, Youssef  returns to his job and minds the store.  On a rare reappearance in there, Mina comes upon the pink fabric, tucked away on a shelf, and realises she must have forgotten she put it there.

    She weeps bitterly when she apologises to Youssef for this – which she does not in the store but in her bedroom:  by this stage, the apprentice has pretty well moved in with his employers, helping with the cooking and cleaning that are now beyond Mina.  From this point on, Maryam Touzani and Nabil Ayouch are engaged in an increasingly tricky balancing act:  can they bring the film’s main themes to fruition while retaining credibility?  I think they do – or, at least, that key scenes are staged well enough to suspend disbelief.  There’s an extraordinary sequence in which the trio dances together in the apartment.  Mina just about summons the strength to do so for a short while and her pleasure in dancing is a poignantly vivid illustration of her capacity for fun.  Yet she also perceives, as she and the two men move to the music, that Halim has relaxed enough to reveal it’s Youssef’s close company in the dance that he’s most enjoying.  When Mina can’t dance any more, she virtually hands Halim over to Youssef.

    When Halim subsequently and tearfully tells her how sorry he is for trying but always failing to suppress his true sexual feelings, Mina insists she’s nevertheless grateful for the strengths of their marriage.  She tells Halim she wants him to be happy and urges him not to be afraid to love.  Same-sex activity, for both men and women, remains illegal in Morocco.  Is it even plausible for a Moroccan woman – especially the practising Muslim that Mina seems to be – to give permission to a man to replace her in her husband’s life, as she does in that pas de trois and in what she then says to Halim?  Perhaps not, but Luzna Azabal brilliantly conveys a sense that, as she nears death, Mina, without renouncing her religion, is seized by the stronger imperative to do right by the man she still loves.  It helps, too, that Maryam Touzani never reduces Mina to saintliness.  She dresses and bathes herself independently for as long as she can.  Halim is always on hand yet retains a respectful, fearful distance at the sight of his wife’s painfully thin, naked back.  She eventually asks him to help undress her and to wash her hair.  He fingers her mastectomy scar tentatively, curiously.  When he washes her hair, Mina laughs in pleasure and Azabal makes the laugh throaty, almost lustful.  For most of the film, it’s not clear if Mina knows what Halim gets up to at the public bathhouse.  In their hot, small apartment, not long before she dies, she tells him and Youssef they both ‘stink like camels’ and to take themselves off to the hammam.  They do as she says.

    This film’s approach to its subject matter is unusually clear-minded and fair-minded.  The Blue Caftan doesn’t condemn Halim and Mina’s years together as a waste of their time.  But nor does it dodge the fact that sexual incompatibility has made both their lives deeply frustrating.  It doesn’t pretend that it would have been easy in the society of which they’re part for Halim to come out as gay; at the same time, Mina’s awareness of what can go on in a single-sex bathhouse suggests that women like her aren’t blind but, rather, capable of turning a blind eye.   Neither protagonist is treated as merely a victim of the other or of their culture.  The intelligent balance of the piece enables both main actors to build penetrative characterisations.  Saleh Bakri’s finely modulated anguish beautifully complements Luzna Azabal’s more startling, volatile presence and power.  The role of Youssef is relatively underwritten but Ayoub Missioui plays it well.

    It’s no surprise that the title clothing plays a big part in the film’s climax but this is satisfyingly achieved.  Work on the dress is completed just as Mina dies.  When other women come to the apartment to prepare her, all in white, for her funeral, Halim sacrilegiously interrupts and tells them to leave.  He uses the ornate blue caftan to dress his late wife for burial.  He and Youssef bear Mina’s coffin to the cemetery, along a route that’s become familiar through repeated shots of it in the course of the story.  The closing scene of The Blue Caftan also works well.  Halim and Youssef are shown sitting side by side in the  café where Halim once sat with Mina.  You do wonder what kind of future these two men can have together.  How easily will Halim slough off a lifelong guilty conscience?  Is Youssef, twenty years his junior, really devoted to Halim?   But they blend easily enough into their surroundings.  Their faces and body language give little away about their relationship.  A homosocial environment, in which most eyes are glued to the sport on television, affords good camouflage.

    15 October 2022

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