I've held off reviewing this film because I didn't quite know how to approach describing it, nor whether I could do justice to portraying its themes, and the effect that it has. It is undoubtedly to my mind a brilliantly executed film. Ryan Coogler knows what he's trying to achieve and sticks to his aesthetic guns over the whole approach to storytelling. Some might find it a bit too self consciously unrelenting in its stylisation, which I can understand. It is a bizarrely over the top baroque film about the blues, and how this is intrinsically intertwined with, and hence, representative of the black experience in the US. How that consciousness used its blues music to break out of the confines of slavery, segregation and the whole bible belt thumping evangelism of blues music being a sinful work of the devil. Blues becomes a liberative force for good or ill.
Young Sammy Moore (Miles Caton) returns to his home and to his preacher Father, with only the broken fret of his guitar in his hand, deep scars etched across the left of his face. He's been out playing the blues last night and something happened that has devilishly mortified his soul. And the film then tells you the story of how that night came about. Stack and Smoke ( both Micheal C Jordan ) are twin brothers who return to their homeland after a period in Chicago. They have pockets full, with a good deal of cash to splash, but everyone who knows them understands this wealth was not acquired by healthy legitimate means. They purchase a huge barn with the intention of creating a dance club, a juke for black folks to congregate, drink, eat and socialise in.
The first half of the movie is taken up with the brothers gathering up friends and old girlfriends to run the juke. The ex girlfriend Mary ( Haliee Steinfield ) of mix race, The girlfriend and voodoo practitioner Annie (Wunmi Musaku ). Delta Slim ( Delroy Lindo ) the old timer blues pianist. Cornbread ( Omar Benson Miller ) a man desperate to break away from his life as a sharecropper. And throughout all this process of assembling the team, blues music rumbles on in the background in almost every scene. This propels the movie onwards to the opening night. When the brothers realise this is never going to make them money, because too many folks can only pay with their plantation tokens, not real redeemable money. But let them have their fun for this one night.
The central scene of the entire movie pivots around Sammy's debut performance, singing a song I Lied To You, by way of an apology to his Father for pursuing the life of a blues musician. It's spine tinglingly good. The performance unleashes the whole of black ancestry, the spirits from all cultures from the past and the future come to manifest themselves in this one juke,summoned by the power of Sammy's Blues. Its a visual and musical tour de force that takes your breath away. But it also brings forth malevolent forces in the form of Remmick ( Jack O'Conner ) and his gang of vampiric followers. And literally all hell breaks loose to save Sammy's soul from capture by the Devil.
So, not a small scale independent movie, but a whopping great beast of a tale, superbly rendered and sung with a bellowing voice from a fast beating heart. This simply wipes the floor with a lot of this years film releases.
CARROT REVIEW - 8/8
No comments:
Post a Comment