CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: TIMBUKTU (ABDERRAHMANE SISSAKO, MAURITANIA / FRANCE

Reposting on the day of the film's U.S. theatrical release, because it was one of the clear highlights of my very satisfying 2014, and it never hurts to remind people when a masterpiece is hanging around, waiting to be seen.

Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best Director
Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16
World premiere: 15 May, 2014, Cannes International Film Festival

There is a heightened irony at the heart of Timbuktu that is completely obvious, and which fuels the rage that drives every moment of Abderrahmane Sissako's first feature in eight years, following the great and underseen Bamako: that forcing religious piety onto a population is a one-way ticket to creating Hell on Earth. And thus it is that one of the most visually beautiful films of 2014 (cinematographer Sofiane El Fani has made every single frame positively vibrate with precise compositions, lighting, and use of color) tells one of the most severe, ghastly stories. It creates a totally disorienting clash of sensations, like watching Terrence Malick make a torture porno: how can such flawlessly beauty harbor such casual, unforced cruelty? The film's signature moment is one breathtaking image of a river at sunset, an extravagant wide shot that lingers and lasts and sinks into your eyes with grandeur, both natural and cinematic. And what occurs in this long, long shot? A character we've come to like and respect as a decent man in an indecent world kills a man. Not deliberately nor in malice, but that's of little matter once the deed is done.

The film takes place in Mali (it was shot in Mauritania), during the 2012 rebellions and coups and all manner of dismal conflicts that put a fundamentalist Muslim party in control of the north of the country, instituting sharia law over the population under its control. For our purposes, that mostly refers to the city of Timbuktu, an ethnic polyglot whose openness makes it a prime target for fundamentalist ire; over the objections of the local imam (Adel Mahmoud Cherif), the jihadists wage a kind of urban war against anything that exists outside of their narrowly-defined rules of propriety and morality: artists, athletes, and people who just want to enjoy the outside air despite being women, are all taken down in the raging sectarian violence. Meanwhile, far outside the city, a domestic drama plays out quietly: nomadic cattle rancher Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), of the Tuareg people, his wife Satima (Toulou Kiki), their daughter Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed), and adopted ward Issan (Mehdi A.G. Mohamed) do their very best to live peaceably in their isolation, but even in the earliest moments we see them, there are encroaching threats from the jihad's reign of terror, and Kidane's prideful refusal to move, against Satima's urgent counsel, is plainly incapable of doing much other than to hasten his and his family's fate.

For Sissako, one of the great humanists presently at work in world cinema, the obvious approach to depict this misery and nastiness was through great restraint that implies the worst without being remotely exploitative or undignified to the suffering of those who ended up on the bad side of the jihadists. Case in point: one of the main events that triggered the director's decision to make this film was when he witnessed footage of the stoning of an unmarried couple, buried up to their necks before being executed. That event is re-created in Timbuktu, and it is grueling and horrifying, but not because it is grotesque and explicit. In fact, by refusing to give the audience any sort of release along those lines, the sequence - which takes place in a wide shot and cuts short long before things get too violent - is even more distressing and brutal, since it is so painfully objective and matter-of-fact. The complex, geometrically pleasing compositions remain in this moments of appalling violence; in refusing to sensationalise the acts, the film avoids reducing them to the level of entertainment, but instead demands that we consider them as part of the same flow of life that can produce intimacy and beauty. And that is the worst thing of all.

It is quite impossible to consider Timbuktu to be anything but a great work of art, with its intensely moral worldview and the complicated, hugely rewarding relationship between its beautiful images and its bottomless awareness of human misery. And it also represents an interesting turn in the director's career, though one about which it is easy to be leery: it's the most explicitly "art housey" of his movies so far, and in this case, that means terrific things: marrying the hallmarks of great African cinema (the strong use of contrasting colors as a storytelling and character-building element; terrific sense of humans as a function of physical place) with European art cinema (the narrative structure, the way the politics are expressed ironically). But it also feels far more conventional than the other Sissako I've seen, and I'd hate to think of him ceding the unique personality that led to Bamako and Waiting for Happiness, films that absolutely could not ever have been made in Europe. That's the pessimistic outlook, of course; nothing in Timbuktu gives us any cause to fear that the director is compromising his visions in the slightest, only augmenting them with slightly more stock-issue aesthetic choices. It's still one of 2014's very best films, and that's what matters most of all.

9/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: OF GOOD REPORT (JAHMIL X.T. QUBEKA, SOUTH AFRICA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/17 & 10/19 & 10/20
World premiere: 9 August, 2013, South Africa

The ability to completely discombobulate the audience is one that any good thriller-make should count among their skills, and with Of Good Report, director Jahmil X.T. Qubanka proves that he has that down cold. Lord knows it's not the first film that has tricked us into feeling sympathy for a painfully awkward nice guy and then pull the rug out midway through and inform us that this whole time, we've been rooting for a psycho, but there's something about the particular way that the ingredients are assembled here that makes it an unusually gripping example of the form. The film itself has problems in a lot of ways - none that are very big and certainly none that are film-breaking, but enough of them to cool one's enthusiasm for the whole distinctly - but the one thing it does perfectly, I believe, is getting us positioned tightly in its coils unawares, and squeezing.

The man in question is Parker Sithole (Mothusi Magano), first introduced in one of those disconcerting opening scenes that's obviously from later in the movie, so just sit tight and we'll get back here and everything will make sense. I'm really starting the hate the living daylights out of that trend. When we flash back an unspecified period of time, Sithole has just started working as a professor of English at a high school in South Africa, being so silent and shy that it's kind of astonishing that he's able to communicate any ideas to his students at all. He also lives in a metal shack operated by an impatient, sharp-tongued landlady (Nomhlé Nkyonyeni), who clearly doesn't trust something about him.

That there is darkness in him is easy enough to spot from the way that he clouds over when his unspecific past in the military is mentioned; but that's got nothing on what happens when he starts becoming a little too friendly with one of his students, a 16-year-old girl suggestively named Nolitha (Petronella Tshuma). Just like that, this very sad, strained man that we've been drawn to pity steps over the line to start sleeping with his student - I don't know if it counts as statutory rape in South Africa, but the ethical issues know no national boundaries - and things start to go terribly far south as she grows a little obsessed with him, and he grows a lot obsessed with her, and then as will always happen in dramatic stories like this, a pregnancy arrives. So far, so melodramatic, but it's not until after Nolitha undergoes a traumatic abortion and tries to get back to a normal life that the true depths to which Sithole can and will sink in pursuit of his lusts become revealed. Spoiler: very deep depths.

I don't think I'm claiming more than the film can support if I suggest that one of the things it does best, after tricking us into feeling sorry for Sithole and then keeping us on the hook for his horrifying actions, is impugning the overweening male privilege that got us there. There are many first-person shots from Sithole's perspective in this movie, including the very first one, and these I cannot explain unless it's that we're being obliged to yoke our perspective to his own in order to make us uncomfortable aware of how he sees the world. And his way of seeing the world is one that, not to put a fine point on it, objectifies women, not as sexual playthings but as something weird and inexplicable and other. Indeed, more women in the film are confusing if not outright terrifying to Sithole than sexually arousing. It's almost like a parody of male gaze, and certainly a condemnation of it, made particularly clear in the last third of the movie when any lingering suspicion that we're meant to identify with Sithole is wiped away by the sheer accumulation of horrors he perpetrates: we're forced to identify with him, but it's not something that is likely to make any of us feel very good, and I suspect that Qubanka does this on purpose, calling attention to how much evil Sithole can get away with because our natural inclination to let men get away with it gives people like that power.

Probably best not to make too much of the film's politics, though, for mostly, it wants to be a harsh and nasty thriller, and by all means, it's a good one. Magano plays meekness and neuroses tremendously well, managing to seem both pathetic and threatening as hell with such tiny shifts of emphasis that you can't even quite identify what he's doing differently; it makes for a genuinely involving and unpredictable character, one that the director and actor keep just distant enough that we can figure him out, thus normalising him thus making him someone we don't need to be terrified. We do, in fact, need to be very terrified of this man, and it's a real credit to the artists that this film is so tense and disturbing despite being made on an obvious shoestring, and despite a cast that, outside of Magano, certainly doesn't err on the side of great performances. Honestly, the further we get from the central character, the thinner the thing becomes: a little washed-out, a little over-emphasised.

But where it counts, it hits hard, and it's unforgiving. This isn't a masterpiece for Qubanka, but it's enough to suggest that a masterpiece is within him, somewhere, and I for one look forward very much to seeing where he goes from here.

7/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: IMBABAZI: THE PARDON (JOËL KAREKEZI, RWANDA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/20 & 10/21
World premiere: 28 January, 2013, Göteborg International Film Festival

There was a time, believe it or not, when 70 minutes or so was considered quite a fine running time for a feature film - certainly on the short side of things rather than the long side, but common enough that it bore no mentioning. That time was about 90 years ago. Nowadays, a film that short - freakishly short, by some commercial standards - is far enough away from the mainstream of things that it's tempting to accuse it of requiring an entirely different storytelling skill set, one that there's not very much reason to cultivate.

Imbabazi: The Pardon is 73 minutes long, and it strikes me that writer-director Joël Karekezi has not done the work of cultivating that skill set just yet, because whatever its other virtues and demerits, it's not a 73-minute story. In fact, you might want save a copy of this review, because it is about to mark a heretofore unknown moment in this blog's history, where I make the incredibly uncharacteristic claim that this here movie, frankly, needs to be a whole lot longer. It's not that it's so short in this iteration that it doesn't have the proper room to breathe; it's so short that it doesn't function, not in anything like the way that the filmmakers presumably intended.

The setting is Rwanda in 2009 briefly, and then 1994, and then 2009 again. Fifteen years after the genocide that turned that country into a living hell for the Tutsi ethnic group, one survivor, Karemera (Wilson Egessa), receives a shocking bit of news: Manzi is being released from prison, at long last. Who Manzi is, and why this should offend Karemera so much, is the subject of a flashback that begins quite without formal announcement, a gesture that I quite liked; it suggests the rude, abrupt way that the past has asserted itself without even a "by your leave".

And so, in 1994, we find the younger Karemera and Manzi (Joel Okuyo Atiku,) are dear, dear friends, comfortable in each other's lives in all the ways that happen when you've known somebody since before you remember. The problem is that Manzi is a Hutu, and Karemera is a Tutsi, and we arrive on the scene right around the time that the paramilitary rhetoric being pumped over the airwaves on a constant basis has riled up ethnic tension in Rwanda to a point it's more a question of how and when the Hutus will act on their increasingly inflamed race hate. It's enough to get Karemera fired from his job as a waiter, and it's as he wanders about jobless that he's accosted by one of the leaders of an exceptionally radical Tutsi resistance group, asking that he join in the violent countermeasures they're planning. Karemera rejects this offer flat, but the two of them are together on the street just long enough for Manzi to spot them, and make the wrong conclusions, putting a severe crack in the friends' relationship. From here it's only a tiny nudge before Manzi, already under considerable pressure in the powder keg of Rwanda in spring, 1994, joins up with the local militia, to get his training in how to kill the Tutsi cockroaches with the machetes that became the iconic weapon of the genocide. Without bothering to go into much detail, let us say that his baptism involves taking particularly retributive action against Karemera, stamping out the last measure of kindly feeling that he still has in his heart.

15 years go by in the flash of a cut (another great little touch), and now Manzi wants, genuinely, to atone; where for Karemera, the only atonement that could be acceptable would be to die and leave behind no trace of memory. This intractable situation crops up immediately and steadfastly refuses to resolve as penance and forgiveness war with the perpetuation of justifiable but nonconstructive hatred and resentment, in what could potentially be a more overt allegory for Rwanda's attempt to survive its traumatic past and built up a future, but that would probably require the characters having silly, metaphorically-laden names, so let's just go ahead and say that this is a staggeringly unsubtle allegory altogether.

The film is damn lucky that it can get by on allegory, because it was never going to hack it as a character drama. The biggest reason takes us back to the film's running time: with 73 minutes to cover, really, two entirely different plot lines (Manzi joins the militia and then has to face his emotional reluctance to perpetuate this violence; Manzi wishes above all to atone, but Karemera wishes to deny him that escape from his deeds), there's not a frame that can be wasted, and Imbabazi has at least this much success: it whittles the conflict down to its essentials bit and pieces required to tell a coherent story. Where things are sacrificed, unfortunately, comes in the form of things like a well-established backstory that shows us Manzi's relationship with Karemera in sufficient plot-free detail that we understand who they are as friends and what is being lost to the civil violence. Such a minuscule amount of the short running time is devoted to pre-genocidal rhetoric Rwanda that we can fairly claim that the film offers us no good look at this state of affairs at all. The friendship between they two men is stated; it is stated all over. It is not, though, shown, and cinema, as we all know, is a showing medium.

Besides, even if the script was airtight through some miracle, we'd still have a largely unforgivable population of actors, though it is probably more the fault of the director given that every performance goes wrong in about the same way: over-declaratory opening material that turns into something more sedate and rational fast enough that it's pretty clearly not just a stylistic thing that I don't get. At their worst, the performance throw their arms and orate their lines (which are predominately in English) like how a teenager might think you're supposed to play Shakespeare.

No mincing words: we need Rwandan genocide films. It is a subject that has been documented and discussed in such fringy ways that it still, almost two decades on, a sort of blank spot in most Westerners' sense of recent history, and there is clearly so much unresolved trauma around the question, "how do we again live as neighbors and brothers in the aftermath of such widespread atrocity?" that as long as Rwandans keep making fictional treatments of this topic, I will keep seeking them out. But sociology only gets you so far when the drama is totally stillborn, and there's nothing in Imbabazi, which reheats existing arguments and does so with a nearly complete absence of visual grace, that saves it from its peculiarly flaccid script.

5/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: BLACK SOUTH-EASTER (CAREY McKENZIE, SOUTH AFRICA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/14 & 10/18
World premiere: 12 October, 2013, Chicago International Film Festival

There is, as far as I can tell, nothing wrong with Black South-Easter. That is the good news. It's a snugly-plotted cop thriller in which the build of scene upon scene is elegantly focused on moving the protagonist from clue to clue until he eventually knows enough to start taking decisive action against the people who've been up to no good all along. On the other hand, there is, as far as I can tell, nothing within the film that answers the question, "why did this story have to be told?", and that is definitely the bad news.

I'll be the first to admit that there's a distinct feeling of cultural specificity to the film that probably makes my question moot, the thing that an American can ask only because he has no clue about the sociocultural stew that acts as the film's backdrop. You'd have to be blind, anyway, not to observe that Black South-Easter is a product of a culture with an incredibly specific mixture of races and nationalities, and these do not merely provide a backdrop for the plot to spin out against, but form the spine of what the conflict and narrative even is. There's every reason I can think of to assume that the film thus functions as a working-out of South African tensions between various in- and out-groups, with the specter of Apartheid still lurking around even after two decades. But that's still on the film to communicate, ultimately, and while there might very well be good reasons to care about the conflict presented here, they are not reasons that the film itself manages to communicate very well, and that is all we're interested in, after all.

The film opens in the wake of one of the heavy seasonal rains from which the film derives its title; this particular storm has left a dead body on a beach outside Cape Town, that of a Chinese national with flesh cut off his corpse in such a way that suggests someone was trying to disguise his connection to a Triad gang. The cop assigned to investigate the case is Sizwe (Tony Kgoroge), who has overcome a shady past to rise up through the Cape Town police force, such that he's been promised by his Afrikaner boss Venske (Deon Lotz) that pending a reasonably quick and decisive resolution to this dead gangster - a situation of considerable tension, given that the victim was a foreigner - that his promotion to full detective will be a foregone conclusion. Neither speed nor clarity are in the offing, though, and the more effort that Sizwe puts into tracking the body back through the smuggling rings operated by South Africa's Chinese resident population, first the small matter of black market abalone and then the great matter of narcotics, the more tendrils the case seems to contain. Eventually, it even connects to Sizwe's own past, as he finds that his old friend from a more revolutionary youth, a black marketeer going by the name Specialist (Fana Mokoena) is tied up in all of this. And that's to say nothing of the dirty cops that always show up in stories like this one.

Certainly, there is pleasure to be had in watching a dogged cop hack his way through secrets and lies on his way to finding a truth, even when (as in Black South-Easter) that truth is more of the "everything is so corrupt that you can never put together a grand narrative of it all, just take down as many mid-tier badguys as you can find" variety than a more crowd-pleasingly Hollywoodized "look at who the secret big bad was all along! Now drop him off a bridge!" variety, and this is certainly the way it should be. The film is so unremittingly pessimistic at all corners that any conventionally satisfying conclusion would be completely disingenuous, so even if the last ten minutes of the film do feel like they err slightly on the side of nihilism, that's honestly what the film was leading up to all along, anyway. Still, it gets back to the "why are you telling me this story?" thing - there's certainly not a society-spanning plot that Sizwe uncovers, just a small corner of depravity, and it's just not that different from every other story of the same basic mold ("cop vs. drug ring") except in that it was shot by South Africans in South Africa, and it has a polyglot command of language.

Kgoroge's performance is tremendously striking at least, and Mokoena might even be better as a friendly face with threatening undertones, so even if the plot doesn't quite ignite the characters involved are more than typically interesting. And writer-director Carey McKenzie deserves credit for the smoothness of what she's constructed, absent perhaps the odd injection of video recordings in which Sizwe's friends and colleagues are being interviewed about him, an ex post facto gesture that tells us from the first minute that this will all end badly, but doesn't feel organically tied in with the rest of the film, nor does it reveal enough of the policeman's inner life to make this more of a character study than a procedural.

There's also an argument to be made that McKenzie's efficient filmmaking hampers the film: she and cinematographer Shane Daly employ a visual aesthetic that I could best describe as "functional", with a few hints of film noir lighting that don't make it look any more interesting than it has to, and fails to give the film a sense of urban realism in the French Connection vein. It's a little pedestrian, to go along with its somewhat pedestrian storytelling.

Still and all, it's never boring or flabby, just somewhat generic. And I suppose it's the case that by virtue of being South African and not, say, the 100th version of this story set in Los Angeles, it automatically becomes more interesting than its routine style and content would indicate. It's not the kind of movie you'd ever regret seeing, then, although it's also not the kind of movie that engenders such passion that it seems desperately important that it breaks out of the film festival rut.

6/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: DIE WELT (ALEX PITSTRA, NETHERLANDS-TUNISIA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/13 & 10/14
World premiere: 26 March, 2013, New Directors/New Films

In a lot of ways, the debut film of director Alex Pitstra, Die Welt, is a paint-by-numbers affair - the lines flawlessly filled in, which not everyone can do, but still - but I think it's fair to start talking about where it begins, with a truly audacious opening scene. Here, Tunisian video store clerk Abdallah (Abdelhamid Nawara) does everything short of begging his customer (Mohammed Hassine Belkhala) to pick any film for rent other than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It is a film that deeply offends him; not on an artistic level (though probably that as well), but because its idiotic reduction of life to what explodes where and who dies as a result has coded in it an anti-Arab, pro-American military message. He cannot simply make this claim and be done with it (it's not like there's any room to argue that Michael Bay films aren't enthusiastic commercials for the U.S. military), but has to state with increasing detail and increasing fervor, eventually offering up a selection of better American-made films that manage to more intelligently depict Arabs as something besides "the brown people who get blown up". The customer looks at him blankly, and says that he still wants Transformers.

It's a terrifically ambivalent scene that encapsulates the heart and soul of what proves to be an ambivalent movie; yes, cultural hegemony and Western imperialism are ghastly realities, but the slick package America sells is still mighty appealing to a lot of people, and while Abdallah has no affection for the United States itself anywhere in the film's 80 minutes, that's not at all to say that he's free from romanticising the Eurocentric culture which finds its most prominent incarnation in that country. The story takes place in 2011, at the time that Tunisia was establishing itself as a newborn democracy, with its first free elections, and Abdallah's story can be read as a metaphor for the country attempting to model itself on the European model while also maintaining something irreducibly North African in its heart, but thankfully, Pitstra and his writers do not insist on this reading, and in fact somewhat attempt to discourage us from going all the way there by grounding so much of the plot in plainly non-symbolic scenes of Abdallah's regular life.

Still, you can't possibly miss how much of this is in some way an echo of greater currents of history, especially in moments like the one where Abdallah caustically conflates Facebook use among Tunisian youth with the widespread unemployment among the same population, one of the most biting of many moments in which the spectre of a specifically U.S. company colonising the world makes its way into the film, and also one of the punchiest bits of humor in a film that has an unexpected but hugely welcome strain of sardonic wit; it wouldn't take too many tweaks for Die Welt to transform into an absurdist black comedy of Kafkaesque dimensions, and there are in fact scenes that play out more or less exactly that way, moreso near the end. And the end, I take it to be no coincidence, is the best part of the film: the bleakest but also the funniest part of Abdellah's quest to become a typical middle-class European, expressed in a very late dream sequence that is, to me, the absolute peak of the whole movie, with a satiric but not over-stressed indictment of Western consumer culture that could not better sum up where the whole story feels like it's been heading all along.

All that being said, this is still, ultimately, the story of a 23-year-old going a little bit crazy trying to track down a girl, the pretty Dutch citizen Anna (Ilse Heus) who becomes the human focal point of all Abdallah's daydreams of life as an immigrant. If the film works, it's not because it's a crafty social satire - which it may well be, but that's hardly the recipe for a rollicking good night out at the movies - but because it's a smart character study, based in an autobiographical "what if?" scenario for Pitstra (raised in the Netherlands by his Dutch mother, not meeting his Tunisian father until he was in his 20s), and anchored by an unshowy but solid and fleshed-out performance by Nawara as a young man whose enthusiasm and cynicism are constantly at war with each other.

That, in turn, speaks the biggest reservation I have with the film, which is that it's not ultimately all that innovative, despite the touches around the edges - a story about a boy who over-idealises a woman and makes questionable life decisions because of that? Ooh, tell me more - and doesn't produce any meaningfully creative images, telling its story with more clarity than inspiration. The opening direct-address rant about Transformers is tremendously self-confident, but it's the only scene where Pitstra does much beyond staging the same kind of semi-long takes that tend to happen in movies like this, with the usual arm's-length medium shots. By all means, the movie is good enough, and its perspective is unique enough to be valuable, but "good enough" isn't really the end point that we want films to strive for, after all.

7/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAlL FILM FESTIVAL '13: BATTLE OF TABATÔ (JOÃO VIANA, GUINEA-BISSAU/PORTUGAL)

Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/13
World premiere: 13 February, 2013, Berlin International Film Festival

There's symbolism and there's SYMBOLISM, and João Viana's The Battle of Tabatô tends to traffic in the latter: it has characters and a plot in the strictest sense, but even they are functions more of what the film wants to say about post-colonial Africa than psychologically active players in a drama. This sounds like a complaint, but it's not, entirely; the sprawling mess that is post-colonial Africa is too big to be considered from just one angle, and a heavily moderated metaphorical treatment is as valid as anything. Though I don't entirely know that I mightn't have preferred this particular message, delivered by this particular story, to have been made by a native of the culture being explored, but it doesn't do to be inflexible and mirthless about these things.

Anyway, the point is that there's a hell of a lot of symbolism. And it does start to become a bit overwhelming before very long at all, but the movie is so aggressively idiosyncratic in so many ways that it's not as fatiguing as it readily could be, even to those of us with a pronounced suspicion about symbolism in any and all of its forms.

The simple facts of the movie are these: Fatu (Fatu Djebaté) is marrying Mamadu (Mamadu Baio), and her father (Imutar Djebaté) returns from Europe to Guinea-Bissau for the first time in many years to be present; he has been carrying around considerable guilt and trauma over his role in the wars of a generation ago, when the country was still a Portuguese colony. The ceremony is to be held in Tabatô, a village of great historical importance in the development of the art of the Mandinka empire many centuries ago, and when tragedy strikes, this same village turns into the site of a kind of exorcism by music, in which ancient traditions do war with European conceptions of life and death and personal guilt, in a battle that proves to be rather more figurative than otherwise.

See, even the "facts" start to get muddied up, pretty quickly, in favor of overtly metaphorical relationships between characters and places. Which is as it should be, I suppose, given that Battle of Tabatô starts throwing conceptual arguments our way even before the first images appear, opening with a soothing-voiced narrator recounting the history of Mandinka culture, setting up a "you" and "we" opposition (the exact referent of those pronouns is left unclarified, though I assume it's Europeans/Americans and the people of Western Africa, respectively), and not entirely playing fair, as when he posits that agriculture was invented in Western Africa 4500 years ago, something that the Egyptians of 6000 years ago, for a start, might find a problem with.

Lord knows it's arresting, though, and I'd be lying if I said that I could name another film that resembled it in more than superficial aspects. Using the actions of characters to stand in for approaches to culture, obviously, is not new, though the degree to which Battle of Tabatô doesn't try to hide its allegory by making the human drama more superficially interesting than the cultural commentary is unusual, to say the least. Even in the more plain half of the movie, before the trip to Tabatô enters the land of magical realism and abstraction, has the feeling of a pageant as much as it does representational drama. Viana shots all of this in black and white, and a particularly distancing, soft monochrome it is, too, not like the sharp, somewhat glossy look that tends to characterise modern black and white cinematography. It is a hazy film where even the most basic, everyday objects acquire a certain level of impressionistic dislocation, whether it's as aggressive as in the opening shots of motorcycles tearing down a misty road like patches of white against a grey-black background, or as subtle as a radio booth that becomes less and less definite the more we look at it.

There are plenty of striking compositions throughout, using elements of normal sets in bold and shocking ways: metal grates fragmenting normal shots into a dozen little frames, looming close-ups with abstracted backgrounds. All of it is beautiful in its own right, and it has the effect of making the film seem like it takes place in a conceptual rather than a physical space, and that in turn helps the symbolism. What it doesn't do is help the drama or make any of this more palatable as a movie, and not as an intellectual exercise. Battle of Tabatô is, quintessentially, the kind of film that makes people trot out the word "admire" in a particularly dubious way, because the fact of the matter is, this is an awfully dry, unengaging movie. Not that everything has to be a rip-roaring entertainment, because of course there's room for more reflective, subdued movies, but Battle of Tabatô fails to be particularly compelling or engaging in its pursuit of its ideas, and while I'm thrilled to be exposed to these concepts and arguments, that's all the farther that the movie takes me.

7/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: BURN IT UP DJASSA (LONESOME SOLO, IVORY COAST-FRANCE)

Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/19 & 10/21
World premiere: 11 September, 2012, Toronto International Film Festival

There are so many examples across the years of a culture under-represented in mainstream art forms making itself known through the means of a crime drama set on the mean streets of a poor neighborhood that Burn It Up Djassa should be literally incapable of making any kind of impression on anybody, especially since with a feverish 70-minute running time, it really doesn't take the time to establish any setting outside of the bare minimum required to functionally tell its story. At the same time, this mercilessly stripped-down focus gives the film one of the most appeallingly odd storytelling styles that I've encountered in quite a long time: it is literally presented to us as an anecdote, related by somebody who saw some of it and heard really good accounts of the rest. Which is to say, who the hell knows? Certainly, our unnamed onscreen narrator (Mohamed Bamba) is as excited as all hell to tell his story, regardless of whether a single word of it is the sober, God's honest truth, and the vigorous animation with which he moves around, and with the camera races around keeping up with him, immediately gives the film a punchy "hanging out, swapping shit" vibe that benefits it immensely, turning its sparseness into an asset and making it feel okay that it all plays more like a series of vignettes than an actual movie plotline.

That camera, incidentally, belongs to director Lonseome Solo (which is, astoundingly, an assumed name) and cinematographer Delphine Jaquet both of them also among the four screenwriters. They use it largely good effect in capturing the Wassakara neighborhood of Abjidan, former capital of Ivory Coast, employing the usual grab-bag of documentary filmmaking techniques (handheld camera, zooms, talk-head close-ups; it is in fact a very close-up heavy film) in concert with their largely non-professional cast to capture something very rough and raw about the ghetto (the word "djassa" means "ghetto" in the slang dialect that dominates the film). That said, with so little time to spare either onscreen or during production - Burn It Up Djassa enjoyed a meager 11-day shooting schedule - little energy is spilled in depicting the setting, and this can be rightfully considered a disappointment, though the film never really claims to be a depiction of Wassakara, but only a single story taking place in Wassakara to a single person who is never claimed as a representative of a broader culture or the like. Remember, this is an anecdote being told by an enthusiastic, but hardly omnipotent narrator; he's hardly apt to stop and say, "and here's the part where this sad tale is plainly representative of the greater forces at work in our society".

The subject of the film is Tony (Abdoul Karim Konaté), a cheerful rake who lives in a somewhat nicer part of town, but travels into the ghetto to make money selling cigarettes and playing cards (it's suggested in dialogue, but not clarified why, that the life of a cigarette seller is held to be something contemptible). He travels under the name Dabagaou, and is widely liked for his cool attitude and freewheeling life, even if it takes some shadiness to get to that point.

Solo and company offer the smallest possible amount of information to sell this idea before dropping the bottom out. Tony has a sister, Ange (Adelaïde Ouattara) trying, without much success, to make money as a prostitute in the same ghetto. One night, after she's off duty, a man harasses her in a bar, and Tony is so enraged that he leaps at the man, stabbing him and killing him. The cop assigned to the case is, in a fit of ugly coincidence, Tony and Ange's older brother Mike (Mamadou Diomandé), who quickly determines that "Dabagaou" is the killer, though that name seems attached to a figure of myth more than a real person, and it would certainly never cross his mind that his siblings - neither of whom permits him any glimpse into their somewhat sordid lives - are the main players in the crime.

Combining grubby cinéma vérité technique with the moral tragedy of a '30s gangster picture, Burn It Up Djassa doesn't offer much if anything in the way of novelty or surprise, outside of the way that the narrator's recounting of events reframes the events we see as something like re-enactments or pantomimes. What it does have is energy: giddy, relentless energy, most of it centered in Konaté's terrific performance as Tony. Sometimes, non-actors really do have that unaffected immediacy that's supposed to be so wonderful in neo-realism and is usually kind of strained and awful; and this performance is a joyful blast of youth energy, an insufficiently grown-up young man playing things really smoothly until the second that he's not trying to impress anyone, and he becomes outright giddy about his life and his achievements; or, as the film turns darker, he becomes cocksure and proud and aggressive, none of them terribly admirable qualities (particularly given how the film heavily foreshadows the bad end he comes to, so it registers as ironic), but played so lustily that it's hard not to find it magnetic.

Putting us in a position to feel that energy is really the only thing the movie is about: implicitly, it's there in the opening narrative monologue, and there's no moment in the rest of the film where it seems to be about anything else but watching Tony and being dazzled by his headstrong charisma, for both good and ill. I'm not usually one for character studies at the expense of anything else, but when you've got a character this electrifying, and a film that makes such small demands on your time, it's awfully easy to give into it.

8/10

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