Old Yorker

  • 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

     

     

     

  • Spring Blossom

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Seize printemps

    Suzanne Lindon (2020)

    Oh for a C K Scott Moncrieff to turn French film titles into English … His versions of the volume names in A la recherche du temps perdu emulated Proust’s originals – especially Within a Budding Grove, imaginative but thoroughly true to the spirit of the French (A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs).  Spring Blossom, on the other hand, is a tired tag for the story of a teenage girl’s first love.  It’s true Seize printemps, which closed this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, isn’t easily rendered as English idiom but even a literal translation (‘Sixteen Spring’) would have been preferable.  Because it’s trite, Spring Blossom has the incongruously musty ring of an older person’s nostalgic reflections on youthful experience.  Yet Suzanne Lindon, at the time the film was made, was only twenty – an extraordinary age at which to direct, as well as write and play the lead in, your first cinema feature.

    The sixteen-year-old protagonist, also called Suzanne, is a lycée student in Paris, where she lives with her parents (Frédéric Pierrot and Florence Viala) and elder sister (Rebecca Marder).  Suzanne isn’t socially isolated – in the first scene we see her drinking in a café with schoolmates – but she seems removed from the rest of the group and tends to spend her evenings at home, preparing for exams.  When, unusually, she goes to a party, she sits on the sidelines, disengaged.  After a couple of sips from a bottle of beer, she offers it to the girl beside her, remarking that beer is boring.  (Suzanne’s preferred drink is grenadine and lemonade.)  The same girl invites her to rate the boys at the party on a scale from 1 to 10.  Suzanne declares that rating people in this way is horrible idea.  She also says she’d give all the boys a 5.

    At this point in Spring Blossom, Suzanne has already taken notice of a thirtyish man glimpsed through a café window.  She sees him again, getting off a red scooter, close to the theatre which she passes every day en route to and from school.  She’s soon looking out for him and, when she discovers he’s appearing in a play at the theatre, sneaks into the auditorium to watch a rehearsal, unnoticed by the director (Dominique Besnehard) and the cast members.  The actor’s name is Raphaël, and he’s played by Arnaud Valois (120 Beats per Minute) – so a bit more than a 5 out of 10.  Next time she sees him outside the café, Suzanne sits down at a nearby table and a conversation between them starts.  It isn’t long before Raphaël too is trying grenadine and lemonade.  He enthuses but has to get back to the theatre and leaves most of his drink.  After he’s gone Suzanne starts to sip the remainder, through the straw in his glass.

    In time, Suzanne and Raphaël will appear in public together, hold each other and kiss but that’s as far as their relationship goes physically.  Spring Blossom is vivid proof that a passion taking place largely inside a character’s head can be as dramatically satisfying as a full-blown affair.  Lindon achieves this largely through funny, credible details, illustrating, for example, an infatuate’s need to keep the object of their affections both continuously in mind and a secret.  One morning, Raphaël has a problem with his scooter; on another early sighting of him, he’s at his café table eating bread covered in red conserve.  At home, Suzanne asks her nonplussed father questions about leaking engines and her mother for a strawberry jam tartine.  Her parents discuss going out for the evening.  She recommends (though to deaf ears) a theatre visit.

    After Raphaël has asked to see her again, Suzanne, as she walks home, breaks into a celebratory dance – the first and simplest of three choreographed sequences in Spring Blossom.  It’s remarkable how easily Lindon introduces these bursts of unrealism into her predominantly naturalistic narrative:  they function virtually as numbers in a musical – as expressions, that is, of the heightened emotions of the characters concerned.  (In an interview for the Glasgow Film Festival, Lindon told Allison Gardner, the Festival’s co-director, that the choreography was Pina Bausch-inspired.)  By the time that Suzanne and Raphaël perform a gravely elegant pas de deux on the stage of the deserted theatre, the formal novelty is wearing thin but the intervening duet is a real highlight.  Side by side at the café, they listen to a piece of music – she through his headphones, he from memory (the music is used as the overture to the play he’s in).  They stay seated, moving their heads, shoulders and hands in unison – a witty, lyrical expression of their rapport.

    Suzanne is clever, reads grown-up fiction (like Boris Vian’s J’irai cracher sur vos tombes) and is an emotional beginner.  But it’s she who  makes the romantic running, trying to be noticed by a man revealed to be nineteen years her senior.  Lindon seems well aware of the sensitive nature of her scenario:  at the theatre, Raphaël’s character in the play is called Erastes – a term applied in Ancient Greece to an older man in a sexual relationship with an adolescent boy.  The writer-director is doubtless aware too that Spring Blossom could nowadays be acceptable only as the work of a woman film-maker – perhaps only a young woman film-maker.

    Lindon’s age brings to mind a French literary predecessor, Françoise Sagan, who was only eighteen when her debut novel, Bonjour Tristesse, was published in 1954 (and an overnight sensation).  There are big dissimilarities between the two, however.  By the end of the book, Sagan’s seventeen-year-old heroine, Cécile, is precociously regretful – a frame of mind very different from Suzanne’s at the end of Spring Blossom.  Also different is the treatment of fathers.  Whereas Cécile’s is a heartless philanderer, Suzanne’s is loving and attentive; so too her mother but it’s the excellent Frédéric Pierrot’s portrait of the dad that holds your attention.  This droll, normally relaxed fellow gets concerned by his daughter’s increasingly puzzling behaviour.  She arrives in her parents’ bedroom at 2am; when her father asks what the matter is, Suzanne doesn’t seem to know.  Allison Gardner commented in their Festival interview on the positive characterisation of the parents, Suzanne Lindon replied that she wanted to express thanks for the upbringing she received from her own, famous father (Vincent Lindon) and mother (Sandrine Kiberlain).

    Lindon was even younger than Sagan – and a year younger than the film’s Suzanne – when she wrote this script.  At that age, you travel, between one year and the next, what seems a long way; by the time she made the film, Lindon may have felt far removed from her sixteen-year-old self (perhaps especially if the girls playing Suzanne’s school contemporaries really were their characters’ age).  For whatever reason – her inexperience as a screen actor (and director) could also explain it – she sometimes over-interprets Suzanne’s immaturity, her ‘difference’ from the other girls.  She has shadow movements like tugging at her ponytail; twiddling the straw in her glass of grenadine, she gazes into the middle distance, too determinedly distracted.  Lindon is a distinctive and charming performer, though, and very likeable.  Her gamine looks (the dark hair and firm jawline occasionally suggest the young Amélie Mauresmo) are complemented by a fine, toothy grin.

    The character of Raphaël is underwritten – I assume intentionally and I think effectively.  What compels a man like this, apparently well equipped to have his pick of romantic companions, to return the feelings of an eccentric teenager?  I didn’t know but didn’t mind.  Suzanne’s perspective dominates the film; Raphaël’s lack of definition allows him to be her ideal man – without any troubling qualities emerging to complicate the issue.  This only works, however, thanks to the soulful Arnaud Valois.  His Raphaël is an opaque but unarguably romantic presence, though Lindon leavens that impression with an amusing detail.  Raphaël always wears a suit and tie to the theatre.  They give him the look of a cool office worker rather than a bohemian fantasy.

    Spring Blossom’s regular supply of humour doesn’t detract from its emotive heft:  in combining the two, Lindon achieves quite a balancing act.  At the theatre, a melancholy Raphaël admits to fears of no longer knowing how to act; his director tells him he’s just tired.  After declining invitations from his fellow actors to go for a drink, Raphaël eventually joins them in the company of Suzanne, who finds herself on the receiving end of an anxiously egocentric, very funny monologue from the play’s set designer (Philippe Uchan).  The costuming of the principals at this gathering gives emblems of passion a light-hearted twist.  Suzanne wears a fluffy red cardigan over her customary white shirt, and a red scrunchie in her hair; Raphaël has swapped his trademark blue tie for a red one.  These wardrobe details reinforce the red motif in the story’s romantic trajectory – the scooter, the jam, the grenadine.

    They may show their true colour at the drinks party but Suzanne and Raphaël also know by now that their days together are numbered – unless their amour becomes one of a different kind, which it doesn’t.  Without explaining the end of the chaste affair, Lindon makes it make sense.  Suzanne breaks down in tears as she tells her mother that ‘I fell in love with an adult and he’s in love with me too’.  She soon gets over the upset, though.  In the closing sequence, she’s able to stop briefly outside the theatre, grin and walk on.  Spring Blossom is an exceptionally short feature – 73 minutes.  That brevity seems right for the tale of a relationship that comes and goes quickly (I hate to say like spring blossom, though that was clearly in the translator’s mind).  Even so, you feel it won’t quickly be forgotten by Suzanne.  And while it’s too soon to praise her namesake’s film debut as memorable, I won’t be surprised if it proves to be.

    8 March 2021

     

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