Monthly Archives: March 2023

  • The Inspection

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elegance Bratton (2022)

    The Inspection announces itself as ‘inspired by true events’; those events are from the life of its writer-director, whose first dramatic cinema feature this is.  Elegance Bratton was born in New Jersey in 1979.  At the age of sixteen, he came out as gay and was kicked out of home.  He drifted for a decade before joining the US Marines:  after basic training, he transferred in 2005 to the Marine Corps’ Combat Camera Unit, which trained him in film-making and photography.  (He left the Marines to study at Columbia.  He has since made several shorts, a TV series and a documentary feature.)  At the start of The Inspection, Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) gets out of bed in a homeless shelter in Trenton, New Jersey and visits his estranged mother – to get the birth certificate he needs to enlist in the Marines.  Most of the remaining action takes place at boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina.  The film ends in 2005, when Ellis successfully completes his training and meets again with his mother, Inez (Gabrielle Union).  Knowing in advance that the protagonist is Bratton’s alter ego makes the boot camp scenes a bit less hard to stomach:  we can rest assured that Ellis will survive the physical and verbal abuse to which he’s subjected, much of it homophobic, and come through.  It’s the persisting central importance in the story of Inez – and our presupposition that she’s based on Bratton’s own mother, to whom The Inspection is dedicated, in the closing credits – that proves more of a problem.

    Although they don’t get easier to watch, the rigours and ritual humiliations of military training – especially the victimisation of recruits the drill instructor and other thugs take against – are familiar enough on the cinema screen.  Black and gay, Ellis is a potentially distinctive victim on the grounds of ethnicity and sexuality but only the latter really counts.  The bellowing drill sergeant, Laws (Bokeem Woodbine), is himself African-American:  his cultural prejudice, at the height of the War on Terror, is directed chiefly at Ismail (Eman Esfandi), the one Muslim in the small training unit.  Ellis’s gayness – in what was also the era of the US military’s ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ (DADT) policy – is another matter.  The rote questions barked out at the new arrivals include ‘Are you now or have you ever been a homosexual?’ and Ellis yells back no, though it’s plain to see Laws doesn’t believe the answer.  In the showers, Ellis has an erection and is beaten up by others in the unit.  I didn’t understand a short sequence that Bratton inserts just before this mayhem kicks off:  Ellis appears to imagine the other recruits undressed, in a different location, giving him the come-on.  Generating a sexual fantasy while they’re actually naked in the showers together seems a bad moment for Ellis to choose – why would he need to anyway, in order to be aroused?  But from this point on, Ellis is a marked and bullied man.

    Autobiographical it may be but The Inspection often seems the work of a seasoned moviegoer rather than of someone who suffered the particular treatment meted out to Ellis French.  For example, Laws and the other drill sergeant, Rosario (Raúl Castillo), are a well-tried chalk-and-cheese double act (their forerunners in military cinema include the cynical and idealistic sergeants, played by Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe respectively, in Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986)).  From the start, in contrast to the unyielding Laws, Rosario keeps a benignly watchful, if not always an effectively protective, eye on Ellis.  The young man’s worried his mother hasn’t replied to his letters; he begs to borrow Rosario’s phone to call her at work to check she’s OK, and Rosario uneasily agrees.  The sergeant proves he has his own personal problems and is emotionally vulnerable in a phone call to his wife that Ellis happens to overhear.  Each of these episodes has a standard-issue feel.  The only exchange between them that doesn’t, comes late on when Ellis sees Rosario showering alone, approaches him, and the sergeant anxiously warns him off.   Again, I didn’t get why Ellis seemed to be asking for trouble (and so near to graduation into the Marine Corps).  Even if Bratton is advancing the legitimate argument that DADT was essentially homophobic and unjustly prevented gay members of the military from expressing themselves, his means of illustrating the point are puzzling.

    Things improve for Ellis in the home straight of his training.  Harvey (McCaul Lombardi), the nastiest of his fellow trainees, is exposed for what he is.  During target practice, Harvey (forename Laurence!) falsely claims that Ellis has scored much lower than he really has.  There may be other homophobes in the unit but the rest of them seem to recognise the need for fair play.  In the ‘Crucible’ exercise that culminates their training, the Marines-to-be have to paint their faces.  Seeing Ellis, Laws exclaims, ‘What the entire fuck, French!  How did you manage to fag up something as simple as war paint?’  To which Ellis loudly replies, ‘Sir!  This recruit does not know how to not piss you off, sir!’   This is a genuinely funny exchange (it got a well-deserved laugh in the BFI Flare Festival audience) but it’s also the standout instance of The Inspection’s presenting military homophobia as somehow more innocuous once Ellis has got to grips with it.

    Scaling down the abuse he receives in boot camp is also designed to foreground Inez French’s enduring inability to accept her son’s sexuality.  At the start, when Ellis tells his mother he’s enlisting in the Marines, she laughs derisively; handing over his birth certificate, she tells Ellis that, unless he reverts to being ‘the son I gave birth to’, he should ‘consider this certificate void’.  A devout Christian, who works as a prison officer, Inez doesn’t expect Ellis to complete the training; when, thanks to Rosario, he makes phone contact, her immediate reaction to hearing his voice is ‘They’ve thrown you out’.  (Given her attitude, let alone their longstanding estrangement, it’s hard to see why Ellis is surprised that Inez hasn’t been answering his letters.)  She turns up at the passing-out ceremony, sees Ellis in the line-up and weeps with joy.  He treats her to lunch in the restaurant where other new Marines celebrate with their families; she disparages the food but enthuses about her son now having his pick of the girls who, Inez says, will be queuing up for him.  Frustrated but determinedly pleasant, Ellis replies that boot camp hasn’t turned him straight.  Inez instantly flies into a rage so vociferous that Laws intervenes:  in the brief dialogue that follows, the hard-bitten drill sergeant is a spokesman for liberal-minded moderation compared with the mother.  She and Ellis have a further showdown, in a somewhat more private area of the restaurant; she reminds him she gave birth to him when she was sixteen and unmarried, and could easily have abandoned him as a baby.  Ellis tells his mother he’ll never give up on her but they part on bad terms, as far as she’s concerned.

    Jeremy Pope had a small role in Regina King’s One Night in Miami (2020) and appeared in the TV series Hollywood and Pose but is best known to date for his work on stage.  He’s a compelling screen presence, however:  as Ellis, he creates a real force field, without recourse to histrionics.  Pope is especially good at limning the character’s self-control.  He’s by far the best thing in The Inspection though he doesn’t fully conceal its weaknesses.  It’s a relief to watch knowing things will work out all right for Ellis/Elegance yet this also has the effect – in conjunction with the rites-of-passage mechanics of the piece – of neutralising Bratton’s portrait of what Laws describes to a fellow officer as the business of making ‘monsters’.  Perhaps because he already knows the answer himself, the writer-director doesn’t bother to explain why joining the Marines is Ellis’s only escape route from living as a down-and-out.  (He has friends:  we see him saying goodbye to them before he visits his mother at the start but they’re never seen or spoken of again.)  And just about everything to do with Inez feels overdone, including Gabrielle Union’s playing of her.  Justifying himself in his mother’s eyes drives Ellis and seems to be what drove Elegance Bratton to make The Inspection.  His own mother died shortly before it went into production, which may well have intensified Bratton’s need to do this.  But he’s either unwilling or unable to dramatise, other than very crudely, Ellis French’s awareness that his mission to do well by his mother is doomed to failure.

    26 March 2023

  • Who I Am Not

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tünde Skovrán (2023)

    The Romanian actress Tünde Skovrán makes her debut as a feature director with this documentary about two young intersex persons in present-day South Africa.  Tall, elegant Sharon-Rose Khumalo has always identified as female and is sexually attracted to men.  She was adult, and successful on the national beauty-queen circuit, when she found out in 2016 that she had XY chromosomes and no uterus.  She isn’t (or wasn’t at the time of filming) in a settled relationship.  Dimakatso Sebidi, stockier and less pretty, presents as male, uses the pronouns they/them[1] and lives with a female partner.  Born with female and male genitalia but assigned female at birth, DS underwent repeated hospital treatments during childhood, including penis removal, although the relevant medical records no longer exist and DS’s father isn’t sure if the penis was actually removed or if doctors ‘tucked it in’.  In the course of Who I Am Not, Dimakatso visits a gynaecologist, who conducts a genital examination and a genetic test to determine DS’s chromosomal make-up.  The climax to Skovrán’s narrative is the announcement of the test results at a second interview with the gynaecologist – to which Sharon-Rose, rather than DS’s life partner, accompanies Dimakatso.

    It isn’t explained either how the principals came to be involved in the film or at what stage of its development they met each other.  But the climactic visit to the gynaecologist is the third sequence where Sharon-Rose and Dimakatso are on screen together; like the two preceding bits, it’s clearly set up to underline both the differences between them and their fellow feeling.  In the first of these sequences, Sharon-Rose expertly applies cosmetics to Dimakatso’s face, which is unused to make-up, and puts DS in a shirt-dress – a more feminine garment than DS normally wears.  Despite being contrived, the scene is touching.  The cosmetics, although they make Dimakatso prettier, don’t amount to a transformative makeover; nor are they a grotesque denaturing of DS.  The second sequence is simply talk between Sharon-Rose and Dimakatos about some of the challenges they face.  The climactic meeting with the affable, kindly (male) gynaecologist reveals that Dimakatso, who doesn’t identify as female, has XX chromosomes.  Sharon-Rose, sitting alongside, admits that she ‘would have killed’ to get that result.

    Other notable contrasts between Sharon-Rose and Dimakatso include one that’s obvious and intentional, and one that feels inadvertent.  As a beauty queen, Sharon-Rose is used to being a public face and, as a marketing manager for a pharmaceutical company, is comfortably off.  Dimakatso has hitherto lived a life out of sight, with few mod cons, and is struggling to find work.  The presumably unintentional difference between them is that Dimakatso is more likeable and seems more real.  At the start of the film, Sharon-Rose tells us in voiceover that she sometimes wishes ‘my life was a movie’ – for which she had learned the script, in which she knew what would happen.  (Many people, including plenty of non-intersex people, must have had the same thoughts.)  It’s a pity that Sharon-Rose, well aware of the set-up of the film she’s actually appearing in, is inclined to express herself in movie-script clichés.  Dimakatso, who’s not a practised performer, doesn’t.

    Sharon-Rose attends a baby shower, where she sits wistfully on the sidelines; she recalls schooldays, when other girls started to have periods and she lied that she had started too.  Her medical condition seems not to be physically painful in ways that Dimakatso’s is, presumably thanks to those childhood surgeries.  DS sometimes discharges blood in urine – we see it on the underclothes that DS’s partner washes by hand.  A genital examination of DS reveals, as well as that the penis was fully removed, a growth that’s reckoned to be a cross between ovary and testis.  Dimakatso has breasts (which DS binds) as a result of female hormone injections in DS’s formative years; it’s only in the follow-up interview with the gynaecologist that he suggests the urinary blood may be a limited form of menstruation.  DS’s widowed father explains to his daughter (as he continues to see her) that he and DS’s mother believed they were doing the right thing by allowing DS to be ‘emasculated’ although DS recalls still wanting to do ‘boy things’ like play football post-surgery.  The father, who also believes the surgery was God’s will, is eager to be vindicated.  His reaction to the news of Dimakatso’s confirmed XX profile is, ‘So you no longer blame me then?’

    Although both protagonists are Christians, Dimakatso’s beliefs appear to be more deeply rooted.  The film’s juxtaposition of the cultural forces of evangelical Christianity and tribal religion shows the latter as relatively more charitable.  In a packed church service, an aggressive preacher conducts on-the-spot exorcism of the ‘demons’ of a presumably intersex youngster in his congregation.  Visiting a female shaman involves, for Dimakatso, a gruesome ‘cleansing’ ritual involving live chickens (at least they’re live at the start of the ritual) but the wise woman speaks to DS with quiet compassion.  These episodes made me wonder, more than anything else, what the spiritual adepts thought of the film crew’s presence.  Who I Am Not is often affecting but this is usually in spite of Tünde Skovrán’s predilection for staging and visual contrivance (I could have done without repeated images of semi-foetal creatures suspended in dark, glittering water).  That said, one of the staged bits is a delight – partly because it’s also a rare moment of comedy.  Late on in the narrative, DS and partner get a washing machine that will transform their domestic routine.  Along with the friend who helps install it, they go into a celebratory dance as they witness the machine go about its work.  This reaches a climax in the percussive spin cycle whose sound, thanks to the dance, suggests tribal drums.  There’s also an enjoyable moment of light relief in the second interview with the gynaecologist.  When he explains and demonstrates that in males the ring finger is typically longer than the index finger, both Dimakatso and Sharon-Rose are more conspicuously fascinated by this than by anything else they hear from him.

    Who I Am Not received its British premiere at the BFI Flare Festival the evening before I saw it but several important contributors to the film attended this follow-up screening and were welcomed to the platform in NFT3 by Wema Mumma, one of the Flare programmers.  The line-up included, among others, Sharon-Rose Khumalo, Dimakatso Sebidi and Andrei Zinca, one of the film’s producers (and, like its writer-director, Romanian).  In turn, these guests said who they and what their pronouns were; each time this happened, some in the audience whooped and clapped.  Andrei Zinca admitted, almost sheepishly, that he wasn’t intersex and neglected to explain his pronouns:  you could feel the atmosphere change but Zinca redeemed himself by thanking us for coming to the film and asking us to go out and spread the word.  I was relieved for his sake that he got a round of applause after all but what exactly is the word to be spread?

    Probably not that intersex people deserve sympathy – though I must admit I felt that Sharon-Rose and Dimakatso were chiefly unfortunate – and admirable, especially the latter, in coping with their misfortune.  (DS is now an intersex rights activist.)  Sharon-Rose, on a date with a man, tells him that and why she’ll never be able to have children.  As far as the man’s concerned, this means there’s no future in a relationship between them; he tells Sharon-Rose he’s sorry and she tells him not to feel sorry for her.  She seems to take what he says as regret that she’s intersex although the man might have expressed himself in similar terms to a non-intersex woman unable to conceive.

    Who I Am Not no doubt means to promote wider understanding of what it means to be intersex and there’s clearly scope for that.  Dimakatso goes to a laundry to inquire about jobs going; asked to complete a tick-box profile, DS explains why this is easier said than done (the woman who gives DS the form to fill in assumes that intersex is simply the same as transgender).  It’s a difficulty, though, that Tünde Skovrán,  probably without meaning to, is preaching to the converted:  few people who buy a ticket for her film will do so in complete ignorance of what it means to be intersex.  It’s a further difficulty, for the purpose of spreading the word, that Skovrán doesn’t always define her terms precisely.  In the closing titles, she dedicates her film to the estimated 150 million people worldwide with ‘intersex traits’ – but what does that mean?  The phrase has a qualified, cautious ring that rather implies a wider range of conditions than Sharon-Rose’s and Dimakatso’s.  (For example, index finger vs ring finger length is recognised as a sexually dimorphic trait:  are men and women with unusual finger measurements being included in that figure of 150 million?)

    The case for greater acceptance is unarguable, of course, in the sense that intersex people shouldn’t be (as they traditionally have been) stigmatised, ostracised or subjected to surgical intervention decided upon by someone else.  But I got the impression from Who I Am Not and the BFI intro that acceptance in these terms isn’t considered enough – that full ‘inclusion’ is being called for.  The last person to arrive on the NFT3 platform was Valentino Vecchietti, who is not only intersex but also designed the ‘Intersex-Inclusive’ flag that, according to its designer, went viral and is now seen at increasing numbers of Pride festivals around the world.  Inclusiveness in this limited context is one thing, inclusiveness in the ‘binary’ world at large quite another – and Tünde Skovrán raises, without wrestling with, the practical difficulties of the latter.  Near the end of the film, Sharon-Rose insists that individuals are not to be defined by their chromosomes or their ability to give birth:  definition must be self-definition.  This article of faith in identity politics isn’t much help to the manager of a factory where Dimakatso goes for another job interview.  The manager isn’t unsympathetic but he’s worried about the expense of new signage to recognise a group other than men or women.  He wonders which facilities DS will use if there are only male and female toilets.

    22 March 2023

    [1] To avoid ambiguity in this note, however, I’ll be using ‘they/them’ only as pronouns referring to more than one person.  I’ll refer to Dimakatso as DS where I think it makes sense to do so.

Posts navigation