Monthly Archives: December 2016

  • Chocolat

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Roschdy Zem (2016)

    Rafael Padilla – the first black star of the French circus world, who performed under the name of Chocolat – was notably short-legged.  Omar Sy is 6’ 3”:  it’s his towering star stature in France, especially since Intouchables, that explains his casting as Padilla in Chocolat.  Sy came to prominence initially as part of a comedy double act (with Fred Testot) and the formation of Padilla’s partnership with the white clown George Foottit is the starting point of Roschdy Zem’s biographical film.   In the last years of the nineteenth century, Foottit (James Thierrée) and Padilla are both working in the decidedly mediocre Delvaux circus.  Padilla plays, in a loincloth and various tribal paraphernalia, a supposedly funny-scary bogeyman-from-darkest-Africa.  Foottit, a solo act, is warned by the circus owner Delvaux (Frédéric Pierrot) that traditional clowns are on the way out and his performing days numbered.  In desperation, Foottit turns to Padilla and trains him in physical comedy.  ‘Foottit and Chocolat’ are such a hit that they’re snapped up by a big-time operator, Joseph Oller (Olivier Gourmet), who runs the Nouveau Cirque in Paris.  After years of scraping a living in provincial backwaters, the duo are a huge hit in the French capital.

    Padilla’s ethnic novelty helps to make him a celebrity of the Parisian social scene but also reinforces the unstable nature of his succès fou.   As well as wining, dining, womanising and gambling, he’s held in jail for a time because he can’t produce paperwork attesting French citizenship.  Tensions between him and Foottit occasionally express themselves in their performances, even if their enthusiastic audiences can’t see these bits of extra business for what they really are.  Although he finds the love of a good and beautiful woman in Marie (Clotilde Hesme), a young widow, Padilla’s fortunes plummet when he determines to branch out into legitimate theatre – a case of the clown literally wanting to play not Hamlet but Othello, which no black performer in France has done before.  The first and only night of the production goes from bad to worse when, after getting booed in the theatre, Padilla is badly beaten up in the street by debt collectors.   The action jumps forward to 1917.  Back out in the sticks, Padilla is reduced to a job sweeping up for a circus even more downmarket than Delvaux’s.  He is also dying of consumption.  Foottit comes to visit Padilla on what soon turns out to be his deathbed.

    Circus clown routines have always left me cold so most of the comedy of Chocolat was lost on me.  It’s plain to see that George Foottit’s vain attempts to impress Delvaux at the start are physically inventive (James Thierrée, who is Charlie Chaplin’s grandson, is best known for theatre work which, according to Wikipedia, ‘blend[s] contemporary circus, mime, dance, and music’).  Once Foottit and Chocolat got together, however, I was relying on movie clichés to give me my bearings.  It’s obligatory in a showbiz success story on screen for the performer concerned to make an uncertain start before winning their audience over.   Sure enough, Delvaux’s isn’t the only stony face as the new double act gets underway but there’s a transformative turning point and the other spectators on screen are reduced to helpless laughter – even though the act was as unfunny to me after as before.  What’s more unfortunate in Chocolat is that, once things turn serious, the film gets increasingly ridiculous.

    Roschdy Zem avoids the question of whether Rafael Padilla was any good as a Shakespearean tragedian.   Zem does this because he evidently wants Chocolat to be a straightforward moral parable, reflecting racial attitudes in France at the turn of the twentieth century – any rejection Padilla suffers is the result of these.  Zem can’t get away with that, however:  the Othello episode is dramatically crucial to the story and the viewer has to be able to make sense of what’s going on.  Padilla struggles in rehearsals but inexplicably comes good on the night.  Flanked by his Desdemona and his Iago, he is all smiles as he takes a bow; it comes as a nasty surprise to all three of them – and to the play’s director Firmin Gémier (Olivier Rabourdin) – when the curtain call triggers catcalls.  (It seems highly unlikely that a Paris audience of the era would hold back until this point to express its displeasure but that’s a relatively minor problem here.)  Omar Sy seems to give Othello his best shot – presumably in order to express how much playing it means to Padilla.  This seems pointless to the extent that we already know how much it means but it succeeds in doing what Roschdy Zem wants – to obscure the issue of the quality of Chocolat’s acting.

    An interesting online article for Jeune Afrique by the novelist and journalist Nicolas Michel, which appeared in late January this year to coincide with the movie’s French release, summarises ‘what’s true, what’s false’ in Chocolat.  The piece[1] poses and answers ten questions, including whether Rafael Padilla really failed as Othello.  According to Michel, the film conflates two biographical facts.  Padilla was the first black actor to play Othello in France but in a comic, mimed parody of a single scene from Verdi’s opera in 1894.  His failure in straight theatre came seventeen years later in Moses, a play by Edmond Guiraud:  ‘illiterate and incapable of learning lines’, Padilla was overwhelmed by the savage criticism of his performance.  Michel has drawn his information from a 2012 book by the French historian Gérard Noiriel, which is also Roschdy Zem’s source material:  Noiriel gets a screenplay credit, along with Zem, Cyril Gely and Olivier Gorce.   The answer to seven of the ten questions is ‘false’ and to one of the remaining three – was Chocolat’s real name Rafael Padilla? – ‘uncertain’.  One of the two ‘trues’ is that he was born into slavery, in Cuba.

    Nicolas Michel doesn’t feel the ‘false’ answers invalidate Roschdy Zem’s ‘artistic choice’.  That may be right in theory but Zem and his co-writers don’t supply the character detail we need to believe in Rafael Padilla on the film’s largely fictional terms.  He’s a racial paradigm in a particular time and place yet we get little idea of Padilla’s feelings about the prejudices he encounters except when the story requires him to resent them very explicitly.  A brief flashback to his Cuban childhood – in which the boy Rafael witnesses his father, serving at table, being made to beg like a dog for his white masters’ amusement – is truly shocking but it doesn’t connect with anything the adult Padilla says or does.   The women he sleeps with, including his eventual wife, are white:  we never know if this is a reflection of his sexual preferences – and, if so, what that signifies – or merely of what’s available in the belle époque circles in which Padilla moves.  Omar Sy holds the screen throughout with ease but without showing a lot of variety.

    The role of George Foottit (who was English) is even more underwritten.  It’s amusing that, in civvies, Foottit suggests a middle-ranking bureaucrat rather than a clown (it’s especially amusing because James Thierrée, out of make-up, strongly resembles his famous grandfather).  We seem meant to assume – on the grounds that he always looks miserable and at one point, while Padilla is in prison, visits a gay bar – that Foottit is oppressed by being homosexual. By the second half of the film, Roschdy Zem looks to have lost interest in George Foottit:  he turns up when the plot requires him to but does little more than that.  This is the function too, in a minor way, of Victor (Alex Descas), the Haitian subversive Padilla gets acquainted with in jail.   The best acting in the film comes from Frédéric Pierrot in the early scenes.  As Delvaux, Pierrot creates a brief but incisive portrait of a man so jaded by his years running the circus that he’s long past actually enjoying any of the acts that audition for him.

    Closing legends on the screen confirm the title character’s importance in clowning history.  Roschdy Zem then proceeds to demonstrate this with a surprising clip of the real Padilla and Foottit.  The other ‘true’ in Nicolas Michel’s piece is in answer to the question of whether the pair were filmed by the Lumière brothers:  it’s a brief excerpt from this footage that Zem shows.  (It’s also embedded within the online Jeune Afrique article.)  Perhaps the jerky movement of these ancient images helps but I found the clip surprisingly compelling.  The routine looks rougher but physically more daring than any of the choreographed sequences in Zem’s film.   I have to admit that Foottit and Chocolat, in the Lumières’ recording, are funny.

    13 December 2016

    [1]           http://tinyurl.com/z8cdrwp

     

  • The Birth of a Nation (2016)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nate Parker (2016)

    This year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy immediately foretold anxious corrective action in next year’s Academy Awards.  Throughout 2016, there’s been no shortage of potential beneficiaries – Fences, Loving, Moonlight, A United Kingdom.  Things change, of course.  While Fences and Moonlight look set not only to be nominated for Oscars but to win one or two, A United Kingdom won’t be doing either (not this year anyway:  its US release date has been put back to February 2017).  Hidden Figures has now joined the list of contenders.  None of these films, however, has experienced the vicissitudes of The Birth of a Nation, directed and written by and starring Nate Parker.

    The film premiered in January at the Sundance festival, which opened a week after the announcement of the Oscar nominations.  Sundance ended with The Birth of a Nation winning both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for drama.   Parker’s movie commemorates the life of Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831.  The movie’s title, a century on from D W Griffith’s film of the same name, is a political statement – perhaps even a declaration of intent to be mentioned in the same breath as Griffith’s notorious classic.  The $17.5m paid by Fox Searchlight for the worldwide rights to The Birth of a Nation represents the biggest deal ever struck at Sundance.   Two months after opening in North American cinemas, the film has box-office takings approaching double its $8.5m budget; since it’s been released subsequently in only a few other countries to date, describing the film, as some American publications have, as a commercial flop seems an overstatement.  Nevertheless, the box-office performance clearly is much less strong than Fox Searchlight expected back in January and the movie is conspicuous by its absence from most awards slates.  It opened quietly in the UK at the beginning of this month.

    It’s widely assumed that a major factor in what’s happened has been the renewed media coverage during the summer of the rape charges brought in 1999 against Nate Parker and his friend Jean McGianni Celestin, who shares with Parker the story credit for The Birth of a Nation, when they were students at Pennsylvania State University.  Parker was acquitted of the charges; Celestin was initially convicted of sexual assault but the conviction was later overturned on appeal.  There was no retrial because the alleged victim preferred not to testify again.  The young woman concerned committed suicide in 2012.  When the story resurfaced in August this year, a particular bone of contention was Parker’s inclusion in The Birth of a Nation of a brutal rape which has no basis in historical record.

    It would be unfortunate, though understandable, if people have stayed away because of this negative publicity, or if lukewarm reviews of the film were influenced by the scandal and affected audience numbers.  It would also be unfortunate, though, if this is came to be accepted as the sole reason for The Birth of a Nation’s reversal of fortune.  This January, the movie was in the right place at the right time; nine months later, it was easier to take a more considered view of its merits and demerits and the fact is, it’s a pretty bad film.  It’s also an undeniably ambitious one but Nate Parker took on one role too many when he decided to play the lead.  His characterisation lacks evidence of the combination of mobile intelligence and religious faith that it seems drove Nat Turner.  Parker’s pictorial performance is camera-conscious in a particular way:  he seems to have one eye – a director’s eye – on how he’s going to look in rushes.

    It’s a safe bet that none of the cast of The Birth of a Nation, black or white, will feature in next month’s Oscar nominations.  Most of the acting is too deliberate, with reactions often obviously produced and finished, though there’s some good work from Aja Naomi King, as Nat’s wife, Aunjanue Ellis, as his mother, and Penelope Ann Miller.  The latter plays the mother in the plantation-owning family – she enables the boy Nat to learn to read and write, and her son Samuel (Griffin Freeman) and Nat (Tony Espinosa) are boyhood friends.  When they’re men, Nat’s abilities as a preacher are some help to Samuel in alleviating his increasing financial difficulties running the plantation.  The pair travel together to neighbouring plantations in Southampton County, where Nat’s homilies are used to encourage unruly slaves to accept their lot.  Armie Hammer is OK for as long as the adult Samuel’s weak character is muffled by the aggressive racism of others; he’s uninteresting once Samuel is merely a hopeless drunk.  Most of the actors concerned overdo white villainy in an obvious way.  (There’s nothing like the psychological complexity of Michael Fassbender’s Edwin Epps in 12 Years a Slave.)  Their mostly unlovely faces are continually twisted in hate.  None of them dares to be casually nasty.  Jackie Earle Haley is the best of them.

    This is the first feature Nate Parker has made behind the camera (as well as his first feature-length screenplay).  While it’s hard to complain, in view of historical reality, about the amount or the nature of the violence in the film, Parker contrives to make much of it garish.  He’s also happy, whenever it suits, to create tableaux rather than simulate reality; and the climactic confrontation between the rebelling slaves and their white oppressors has an over-choreographed quality.  The score by Henry Jackman is important-motion-picture boilerplate but there is a musical highlight: an excerpt from Nina Simone’s version of ‘Strange Fruit’, which Parker uses to accompany a display of hanging black corpses.  The poetic power of Simone’s voice quite upstages the images on screen.  The role of Christianity is one of the strongest elements in the story and the most dramatically ambiguous:  the Word of the Lord, a means of subduing discontent among the slaves, is used eventually by Nat Turner as justification for the violent uprising.  (This double-edged potential is made explicit in a sequence in which Nat and the disgusting Reverend Walthall, overplayed by Mark Boone Junior, engage in verbal conflict, trading verses from the Bible.)  The Christian mythos is pushed too hard, however, when the film turns Nat into a virtual Christ figure – except that he awaits his execution with dry-eyed fortitude, without agony.  One of the oddest aspects of The Birth of a Nation is the way that it mashes up the heroisms of political conviction, religious self-sacrifice and blaxpoitation cinema.  It’s 1831 but, as the rebellion gathers momentum, Nat Turner tells one of his men, ‘We gotta keep focused, brother.’

    12 December 2016

     

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