Shola Amoo (2019)

Another film missed on its release last year that I was keen to catch up with (on Amazon Prime Video via BFI Player) …

The Last Tree, Shola Amoo’s second feature, has received plenty of critical praise (and has won prizes).  Both the praise and the terms of its expression are unsurprising, thanks to the subject matter and the film’s prevailing style.  The protagonist of this coming-of-age tale is Femi, a young black Briton of Nigerian descent.  Raised by a white foster mother in rural Lincolnshire, he’s reclaimed by his birth mother and moves with her to inner-city London, where he struggles to come to terms with his new environment.  (The piece is semi-autobiographical.  Shola Amoo is now in his thirties so the action is set shortly after the turn of the century.)  Femi is played at different ages by different actors:  that and his ethnicity are enough for a Guardian piece to introduce Amoo as ‘the man behind the British Moonlight’, although Femi’s challenges don’t include being gay.  The Last Tree opens with eleven-year-old Femi and his (white) Lincolnshire friends playing in idyllic countryside:  the sequence is filmed in slow motion, accompanied by the swelling chords of Segun Akinola’s score.  This combination of elements – childhood games in sunlit meadows, slo-mo, consecrative music – tends to get described as ‘lyrical’ and Sight & Sound doesn’t disappoint.  Kate Stables’s review of Amoo’s film on the BFI website is headlined ‘a lyrical story of British identity pains’.

The overused adjective is actually fair enough, to the extent that The Last Tree operates, and is effective, on a predominantly visual and purely emotive level.  Writer-director Amoo tells his story chiefly through the faces of the two young actors playing Femi, both of them highly expressive.  Tai Golding is the pre-adolescent boy and Sam Adewunmi the sixteen-plus version.  The countryside locale of the early scenes is obviously designed to maximise the contrast with the later London ones.  Using a ‘”monochromatic” small town’ – Amoo’s description, in the Guardian interview with Danny Leigh, of where he spent his own early years in foster care – wouldn’t have had the same paradise lost effect.  For a time, the narrative’s lack of context raises questions in your mind.  His birth mother Yinka (Gbemisola Ikumelo) pays a rare visit to Lincolnshire and tells Femi’s foster carer Mary (Denise Black) she wants to take her son back.  You wonder:  is it really as simple as that, even if the fostering is done through a private agency rather than social services?   (There’s never a mention of either.)   Five or so years later in London, Femi is being groomed by Mace (Demmy Ladipo), a local gangster.  It’s not evident why Femi is especially liable to this kind of exploitation – far more so, it seems, than his black school contemporaries[1].

After a while, you realise you’re not going to get this kind of clarification.  It simply doesn’t matter to Shola Amoo, who’s after dramatising the highlights of Femi’s rites of passage to the exclusion of virtually everything and everyone else.  The dialogue is sometimes sharp, as when Yinka yells at her son, ‘I didn’t raise you to behave like this!’, and he calmly replies, ‘You didn’t raise me’.  More often, the script is omissive.  After surviving one of his crises, Femi makes a brief visit to Mary’s home, where he meets the young black boy she’s currently fostering.  (It’s not clear if this is Femi’s first trip back to Lincolnshire since he left it as an eleven-year-old.)   Talking of those she’s cared for over the years, Mary says to Femi, ‘In a way, you’re all my boys’.  He replies, ‘We’re not, though’.  In real life, Mary might well come back with, ‘I said “in a way”…’ and explain more of what she means.  In the film, Femi’s rejoinder strikes her dumb, as if the racial implications of her fostering hadn’t occurred to Mary before – even though the visual evidence suggests she always looks after black kids, despite living in a nearly mono-racial white community.

By the time The Last Tree had reached its third and final ‘act’, I was rather grateful for Amoo’s never-mind-the-cogency-feel-the-moment approach.  As a piece of dramatic construction, the film is weak and clichéd – in, for example, the juxtaposition of Mace and Femi’s schoolteacher, Mr Williams (Nicholas Pinnock).  Well groomed and well spoken, Williams insists that he can help Femi pass his exams; he also says that he was brought up on the estate where Femi now lives with Yinka.  The teacher and the professional criminal are local black boys made good and bad respectively:  Femi must choose which of their paths to follow.   In a climactic confrontation with Williams, Femi loses his temper and lashes out; after a struggle, he breaks down and sobs in his teacher’s arms.  What happens subsequently – whether Femi passes the exams, and so on – isn’t made clear.   His comforting embrace of Femi is the last we see of Williams.  Since he’s too good to be true, this is no great loss.

Another plot strand concerns Femi’s relationship with Tope (Ruthxjiah Bellenea), a girl at his school.  With her remarkably dark skin and blue braids, Tope is ridiculed by Femi’s male pals.  The point is to show Femi initially constrained by, then overcoming, peer pressure:  he takes the other boys to task, and grows closer to Tope.  This too is left in mid-air – more of a pity than it is with the Mr Williams subplot:  the unusually beautiful Ruthxjiah Bellenea is a supple emotional presence and there’s a connection between her and Sam Adewunmi.  Even so, it’s hard to feel that, if he had pursued the Tope strand, Amoo would have been interested enough to give it substance or originality.

The finale sees Femi and Yinka in Lagos, paying a call on Femi’s biological father.   We don’t know how much time has passed since Femi (presumably) chose the right path; whether he or his mother was the prime mover in going to Nigeria; or how long they’re planning to stay there.  We do know the journey to Africa is the remaining necessary stage in Femi’s exploration of his identity.  The scene in which he goes to see his father, at the latter’s palatial home, is, as a cultural insight, the most arresting and amusing in the whole film.  The literally gilded vestibule where Femi waits is bigger than the entire area of his mother’s flat in London.  Femi keeps settling back into the sofa’s plush upholstery.  He gets up to look at an elephant tusk on display nearby.  A maid comes in.  She tenaciously tries but fails to interest Femi (‘sir’) in various things to eat or drink.  Ushered in to meet his father, a pastor (!), Femi also makes the acquaintance of half-siblings he didn’t know he had.

Femi doesn’t react much to all this.  All that counts from the encounter with his father is that it makes him sympathise with, and appreciate as never before, his birth mother, with whom he’s had a mostly combative relationship.  Out on the streets of Lagos, he’s relaxed and smiling as he has a kickabout with some young local kids – making clear he’s really come home.  The closing sequence is Femi on a Lagos beach:  the seashore setting might seem to connect with The 400 Blows (and its numerous descendants) but proves to be a means of tying Amoo’s end to his beginning, with a reprise of the younger Femi in Lincolnshire.  Even though the characters are consistently underwritten, the film is persuasively acted throughout.  Gbemisola Ikumelo develops Yinka from a shrill termagant into a more nuanced personality.  Denise Black’s Mary has real maternal warmth (or perhaps grandmotherly warmth:  Femi calls her Nan).  The physical contrasts and spiritual continuity between the slender, evidently sensitive Tai Golding and Sam Adewunmi’s imposing yet vulnerable version of Femi work well.   On its own, limited terms, The Last Tree is highly successful.

12 July 2020

[1] I can’t identify them, or several other characters, from the IMDb cast list, hence the missing actors’ names in this note.