And other highlights from the St. Louis International Film Festival, Nov. 10-20
By K. Curtis Lyle
For the St. Louis American
During the opening sequences of director Donnie Betts’ soulful homage to playwright/singer/songwriter Oscar Brown Jr., Music is My Life, Politics is My Mistress, Brown sits at a Baby Grand piano in his Chicago living room. As he weaves through the highlights and dark days of his remarkable personal and artistic journey, the camera takes a deep breath and rests itself at the crown of his head. Right above that crown sits a classic portrait of the Queen of the Blues, Bessie Smith.
No image could be more appropriate in defining this important, but largely unrecognized, Chicago giant of progressive thought.
Brown was the oldest son of a prominent Chicago family. His father was the manager of the Ida B. Wells Homes. The history of post-war Black Chicago is the history of his struggle to make art that was socially conscious, community-based, politically progressive and creative in the manner of the jazz- and blues-tinged world that molded him.
Betts uses historical footage, live performances and interviews with Brown’s family and almost every important black artistic personality of his generation (including Amiri Baraka, Abbey Lincoln, Nichelle Nichols and Al Freeman) to drive home the significance of his work. The live performances reveal him to be far and away the greatest spoken word artist who ever lived.
He came from a loving, but strict, black family. His father’s motto for running the Wells Homes was “More Than Shelter, A Way of Life.” This early parental model set Brown on his way toward a lifelong commitment to helping his people. He describes his father as a “race man.” This designation once described a committed and socially conscious black man who unashamedly spoke out against discrimination.
Brown says, “I was supposed to be a lawyer.” However, he was seduced by the earthy and profanely creative streets of his Bronzeville neighborhood. The warmth and continuity of his community began to squeeze from him a deep respect for the rag man, the ice man, the watermelon man and the raw and sonorous calls they emitted as they traveled the back alleys of Bronzeville plying their trades. This energy would become the basis for his art.
Brown’s meeting with Chicago icon Studs Terkel was a turning point. In an interview Terkel describes Brown as the first young black man to be introduced to post-war Chicago as something other than comic relief.
Betts is direct and brutally honest, as is Brown, in showing us the mistakes, mostly personal, that created a hell on earth for Brown’s family; the sequence surrounding the death of his son, Bobo, is tragic. Despite these revelations, the power of his life rolls on like a runaway creative train.
It’s a train we should all get at least one chance to ride.
Plays 2:15 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 12 and 4:15 Sunday, Nov. 13 at the Tivoli.
Sensual Haiti in Montreal
In How to Conquer America in One Night, director and writer Dany LaFerriere has brought us a film from Haiti filled with the bittersweet puzzle of dreams deferred and transferred. We are in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital city, where a sign written in Creole adorns the side of a bus. It reads, “A man who avoids violence is wise, not a coward.” This is the guiding ethic for those who must leave home to avoid political persecution, social isolation and economic deprivation.
Gege is a young cab driver who dreams of moving from the squalor and hopelessness of his Haitian home to Canada; for him, it’s the promised land. His uncle Fanfan, a poet, has a stable situation and can provide a guiding hand in the new land. Fanfan is a cab driver, also. He’s been in the promised land for 20 years and feels the promise slowly slipping away. The fatalism that is endemic to almost all old cultures has finally caught up to him.
LaFerriere sets up an interesting generational conflict between the arriving nephew – innocent, naïve, fresh off of the boat – and the uncle. Gege’s arrival at the flight terminal in Montreal gives us a piercing look into the workings of his personality. He is stopped by a customs agent and challenged, because he has no cash. The length of his visit demands that a certain amount of money must be carried into the country. By the sheer force of will, with an added dash of youthful charm, he turns the agent to his side.
Fanfan, the uncle, has been preparing to return to Haiti to find a lost love. Reverse immigration (return to Haiti) and reverse conquest (Gege’s will to succeed in the new world) set the stage for a wondrous little film.
The language of the immigrants is resonant with allusions to sexual activities and fabulous food. When is the last time you heard poetry presented as the blessing in anticipation of a great meal? Reference to Haitian poets, Rene Depestre and Eric Roumer (both considered national treasures), is an extra, added sensual tidbit.
These small, so-called third world films don’t carry the racial and sexual baggage we do. They don’t take themselves quite so seriously. There’s a hilarious scene where the director, playing himself, appears on TV promoting a book entitled, How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired. You can’t get away with that here!
Plays 5 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 16 and 12 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 19 at the Tivoli.
Missing in action
Danny Glover never does anything that doesn’t deserve praise and thanks. He has put his money where his mouth and prestige and filmmaking skills are and made American film richer just by his presence. In Missing in America, Glover plays Jake, a volatile Vietnam vet who retires to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, creating a de facto hermitage for himself.
Hiding deeper in these forests are other Vietnam vets, even more damaged than Jake. Enter Henry, a jittery ex-pal who has somehow located him in the woods. He has a young Vietnamese girl with him and has come to ask Jake a favor. The favor involves leaving the girl, Leni, his daughter by a Vietnamese woman, with Jake while Henry runs off to a hospital to have his terminal lung cancer treated.
Director Gabrielle Savage Dockterman has created a thematically interesting vehicle and then filled it with cliches. The spiritually wounded Vietnam vet hiding in the forest has been done to death. The father suffering from lung cancer, by implication the result of American military spraying of agent orange, is violently true, but not surprising anymore.
The more interesting storyline is the relationship between Leni and Jake. A grown man, suffering from guilt, attached to soldiers who died in his command, he suffers from a form of arrested development. He drinks when a situation spirals beyond his control. He’s loud. He’s profane. The young girl is loving, forgiving and a healer at heart. This is the core of the story.
The great cast of Glover, Ron Perlman, Linda Hamilton, David Straithairn and Zoe Weizenbaum is wasted. If Dockteramn had stayed with Jake and Leni she might have unearthed some new, sacred ground.
Plays 7:15 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 12 at the Tivoli.
Previously reviewed: Hairkutt
Local filmmaker Curtiss Elliott and two friends decided in February of 2002 that they would make a last-ditch effort to help a friend, a freelance barber known as Hairkutt, to kick heroin. This is the harrowing record of that attempt. They rented a cabin in the Smokey Mountains and videotaped his attempted withdrawal, cold turkey, from the drug. They cleaned-up his vomit, changed his sheets, spoon-fed him and changed his clothes. They totally committed to him. Did it work? The better question is, does it ever really work?
Plays 5:45 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15 at the Tivoli.
