Post by Dracula on Sept 26, 2021 19:24:29 GMT -5
Night of the Kings(8/9/2021)
One of the things that I (and I suspect a lot of people) persistently feel guilty about is that despite having a lot of interest in world cinema my film going diet tends to be largely devoid of movies from Africa. I want to blame circumstances on a lot of this: a lot of African countries don’t have the resources and infrastructure to make movies and various sectarian conflicts make building them difficult, so there’s less of a pipeline for movies from those countries and you tend to see that reflected in the makeup of major festivals and the like which otherwise raise the profile of movies from Europe, Asia, Latin America, etc. Furthermore, the excursions I have made into African cinema have often been rocky. A lot of the art cinema coming out of that country tends to be a touch obtuse and is often concerned with political conflicts that are not terribly easy for outsiders to parse and frankly they often aren’t made with a lot of style and pizazz. Still, I’m increasingly trying to look harder and with that in mind I’m excited to report that an African film that truly excites me seems to have finally come my way in the form of a new release that was picked up by Neon and is currently streaming on Hulu, a film from The Ivory Coast directed by a guy named Philippe Lacôte called Night of the Kings.
The film begins with a young man getting locked up in the infamous MACA Prison, which seems to have something of an Escape From New York philosophy to incarceration in which convicts are basically thrown in and told to fend for themselves with minimal guard interference. I have no idea if the actual prison is run this way (I’m guessing it isn’t) but that’s not really the point, though intensely political this isn’t a neorealist movie trying to shock you with authenticity and is instead reaching for more of a truth through symbolism. As a result of some prison politics this young man, who was a member of a gang called the Microbes, is roped into a sort of prison ritual in which an inmate needs to tell a story over the course of a night that keeps everyone intrigued until the break of dawn. In order to do this the young man starts by talking about the life and death of his former gang leader (a real life figure called Zama King) but as the night goes on he starts embellishing the story and it begins to take on legendary proportions. It does not take an expert in the culture to get what Lacôte is up to with this, he’s taking African oral traditions and associated rituals and applying them and the myth-making they involve to the modern world and the stories that spread through a criminal underworld.
It’s an inherently fascinating concept if you’re able to go with it, though it does take some suspension of disbelief to roll with the idea that prisoners would engage in these rituals and I would say that the prison politics of all this is probably one of the film’s weaker and less understandable elements. Still it more than makes up for this with the sheer filmmaking of it all. While hardly an effects extravaganza this does not look like some sort of third world production made on a shoestring; it has very slick cinematography by Tobie Marier Robitaille and Lacôte shoots the film with a clear sense of purpose. The storytelling scenes are fascinating in the way the prisoners respond to the story being told to them, with some of them ritualistically playacting elements of it in a sort of dance. Again, I highly doubt that this is how any actual prisoners would behave but that’s really not the point, it’s about the ritual, and the story itself ends up touching on various aspects of Ivorian history as well as modern social conditions and which are occasionally dramatized in the film in interesting ways. It would not shock me one bit if Marvel ended up signing Philippe Lacôte to helm Black Panther 3 or something, but I’m just fascinated to see what he can continue doing within a world cinema context and would really like to see his first movie (2014’s Run) if it ever ends up streaming somewhere. It’s definitely one of the year’s best movies.
****1/2 out of Five
One of the things that I (and I suspect a lot of people) persistently feel guilty about is that despite having a lot of interest in world cinema my film going diet tends to be largely devoid of movies from Africa. I want to blame circumstances on a lot of this: a lot of African countries don’t have the resources and infrastructure to make movies and various sectarian conflicts make building them difficult, so there’s less of a pipeline for movies from those countries and you tend to see that reflected in the makeup of major festivals and the like which otherwise raise the profile of movies from Europe, Asia, Latin America, etc. Furthermore, the excursions I have made into African cinema have often been rocky. A lot of the art cinema coming out of that country tends to be a touch obtuse and is often concerned with political conflicts that are not terribly easy for outsiders to parse and frankly they often aren’t made with a lot of style and pizazz. Still, I’m increasingly trying to look harder and with that in mind I’m excited to report that an African film that truly excites me seems to have finally come my way in the form of a new release that was picked up by Neon and is currently streaming on Hulu, a film from The Ivory Coast directed by a guy named Philippe Lacôte called Night of the Kings.
The film begins with a young man getting locked up in the infamous MACA Prison, which seems to have something of an Escape From New York philosophy to incarceration in which convicts are basically thrown in and told to fend for themselves with minimal guard interference. I have no idea if the actual prison is run this way (I’m guessing it isn’t) but that’s not really the point, though intensely political this isn’t a neorealist movie trying to shock you with authenticity and is instead reaching for more of a truth through symbolism. As a result of some prison politics this young man, who was a member of a gang called the Microbes, is roped into a sort of prison ritual in which an inmate needs to tell a story over the course of a night that keeps everyone intrigued until the break of dawn. In order to do this the young man starts by talking about the life and death of his former gang leader (a real life figure called Zama King) but as the night goes on he starts embellishing the story and it begins to take on legendary proportions. It does not take an expert in the culture to get what Lacôte is up to with this, he’s taking African oral traditions and associated rituals and applying them and the myth-making they involve to the modern world and the stories that spread through a criminal underworld.
It’s an inherently fascinating concept if you’re able to go with it, though it does take some suspension of disbelief to roll with the idea that prisoners would engage in these rituals and I would say that the prison politics of all this is probably one of the film’s weaker and less understandable elements. Still it more than makes up for this with the sheer filmmaking of it all. While hardly an effects extravaganza this does not look like some sort of third world production made on a shoestring; it has very slick cinematography by Tobie Marier Robitaille and Lacôte shoots the film with a clear sense of purpose. The storytelling scenes are fascinating in the way the prisoners respond to the story being told to them, with some of them ritualistically playacting elements of it in a sort of dance. Again, I highly doubt that this is how any actual prisoners would behave but that’s really not the point, it’s about the ritual, and the story itself ends up touching on various aspects of Ivorian history as well as modern social conditions and which are occasionally dramatized in the film in interesting ways. It would not shock me one bit if Marvel ended up signing Philippe Lacôte to helm Black Panther 3 or something, but I’m just fascinated to see what he can continue doing within a world cinema context and would really like to see his first movie (2014’s Run) if it ever ends up streaming somewhere. It’s definitely one of the year’s best movies.
****1/2 out of Five
