slavery

Buoyancy (2019)

André Crous

Taking as its central character a soft-spoken teenager from Cambodia, Buoyancy is a restrained but effective depiction of the very real machinations of slavery in the 21st century.  

BuoyancyAustralia
4*

Director:
Rodd Rathjen
Screenwriter:
Rodd Rathjen
Director of Photography:
Michael Latham

Running time: 90 minutes

There have never been more slaves in the world than there are at present, in 2019. The final title card of Rodd Rathjen’s strong debut feature, Buoyancy, informs us that some 200,000 of them are trapped in Southeast Asia.

The ones we meet here represent but a drop in the ocean, but their story is simple enough to comprehend. It also clearly represents the broader range of experiences among the region’s workers often held captive in inhumane conditions. Based on the experiences of many real-life (presumably former) slaves in the region, the story follows the journey of a Cambodian teenager named Chakra (newcomer Sarm Heng) facing the grim reality of life as a slave in the 21st century.

The film has beautiful bookmarks: In the opening shot, we see the back of Chakra’s head. He is carrying a heavy bag across his shoulders, and his shirt is drenched with sweat in the tropical heat. He is heading down a road. In the final shot, we see his face as walks down the same road, his life now completely changed. The events that mark this transition, however, are anything but innocuous.

Buoyancy’s opening minutes broadly sketch Chakra’s domestic situation as one that seems like the beginning of a decades-long dead-end. Living with his parents and multiple siblings under one roof is difficult enough, but Chakra knows things will never get better for him out here in the rice fields of Cambodia. He learns from his football buddies that it’s possible to escape the village for a better life in neighbouring Thailand.

Since he doesn’t have the money to pay a smuggler, he agrees to work for free for the first month. But instead of going to a pineapple factory like the others, he ends up on a boat where time stands still. Underscoring their grim social position are the fish they have to sort through, which are destined to be turned into dogfood. The notion of getting paid anything more than a bowl of rice at the end of a gruelling day of work is one his violent Thai captors, led by Captain Rom Ran (Thanawut Kasro), clearly do not share.

Chakra shows remarkable maturity, or maybe it is his inscrutability that makes him seem less childlike. Despite the hopelessness of this situation, which drives some of his fellow slaves to despair, he perseveres by working as hard as he can. When he realises there will never be a salary at the end of the month, he seeks any way possible to make life bearable and, especially, to rise through the hierarchy among the workers, many of whom are Burmese and stick together against him – an outsider among outsiders.

His expressionlessness saves him because he is not as easy to read as his countryman, Kea (Mony Ros). Kea has a family and wants to send money back home to his children. He senses the danger early on and does his best to protect Chakra as well as his fatherly instincts can, but he also demonstrates how dreams unfulfilled can lead to tragedy. By contrast, Chakra appears not to daydream. He keeps despair at bay by always remaining focused on the present. And when opportunity comes knocking, he is quick to seize the moment and change the future.

Rathjen mixes a documentary approach, including a very mobile camera, with a more artistic sensibility that can sometimes seem dreamlike. Brief moments of respite from the horror include the camera seemingly suspended from the clouds as it looks down at the ship passing below us, framed by the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Thailand, or when Chakra spends a rare moment floating in the water at sunset.

Although deeply satisfying to viewers wound tight as a drum after more than an hour of Chakra’s harrowing and seemingly hopeless fate, the film’s final act seems like wishful thinking. Despite his lack of experience outside the bubble of his small town, he doesn’t make a single mistake out on the boat. Somehow, the sea gods smile on his predicament and allow him to take control of his destiny without much pushback. He reveals himself to be buoyant, able to rise up from intense turmoil, and he doesn’t even get stained by the dirty froth on top.

The sharp focus on Chakra, who appears in every single scene, draws us into his story regardless of whether we feel we understand him. Although a couple of the scenes are haunting because of their implicit inhumanity (the dismemberment of one of the slaves is particularly tough to watch), Buoyancy does not engage in gratuitous violence. Its mostly taciturn central character stoically confronts the tribulations onboard without contriving a drama that might justify a strong reaction. And as a result, the realisation of injustice dawns all the more forcefully on us as we leave the cinema.

Viewed at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.

The Birth of a Nation (2016)

André Crous

Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation tackles America’s original sin with a mesmerising lead performance by the director, but Parker would have benefitted from honing his skills first before bringing this weighty topic to the big screen.

birth-of-a-nationUSA
3.5*

Director:
Nate Parker
Screenwriter:
Nate Parker
Director of Photography:
Elliot Davis

Running time: 120 minutes

Jacques Rivette would have been horrified by one shot towards the very end of The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker’s historic depiction of an unsuccessful uprising among the slave-owning population of south-eastern Virginia in the early 19th-century. Starting with a close-up of a black man hung by the neck and dangling from a tree, the camera slowly and all too elegantly tracks back slowly to reveal six more people – men, women and children – who have suffered the same fate.

The sharp contrast between the brutality these people have suffered and the sophistication of the visuals is similar to the oft-cited indictment of a shot in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 film, Kapò, which led Rivette, at the time a film critic for the Cahiers du cinéma and already a filmmaker in his own right, to pen a scathing article on the use of a dolly shot to transform the abhorrent – his article was titled “On Abjection” – into something pretty and digestible.

Parker wrote and directed The Birth of a Nation 100 years after DW Griffith’s eponymous epic about the Civil War that is often berated for its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and its shocking presentation of black characters. He also stars in the lead role as Nat Turner, a black preacher who is employed by his owner and childhood friend, Samuel, to keep other slaves in line by talking to them about God’s love for them and his desire for them to work hard so that one day, presumably after a lifetime of abuse, they can reach heaven.

Turner, who shared his last name with his owner, as was the usage at the time, has a face we cannot look away from, and Parker’s performance is soft yet riveting. He is a reluctant hero; his awakening is gradual and one that he evidently wants to repress because he knows the likely outcome. And yet, after turning to God to soothe the pain of slavery, blunt the anger he and his fellow slaves feel and talk away the daily abuse, he finally recognises that the Bible has at least as many points justifying an uprising as it has relating to domination by another.

We first meet Turner as a young boy, the son of slaves working on an estate in an outwardly idyllic setting: the lush green forests of Virginia. It goes without saying that the social environment is altogether very different, and despite the desire of the owner’s daughter to raise the precocious Nat in their home to read the Bible (other books are for whites only, she warns), the power structure is immediately clear as Nat’s own mother has no say in the matter.

Over time, he sees the monstrous way in which slave owners in the vicinity handle their workers, especially Raymond Cobb, the ruthless man who went after his father. And while he manages to ignore the harrowing cruelty, it ultimately affects his life directly when two women in his life are raped by smiling white gentlemen. One can almost hear the words of Ezekiel 25:17, made famous by Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, resonate louder and louder as the injustices build on each other with alarming normalcy: “I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”

Unfortunately, there is a palpable sense that this is the film of a first-time filmmaker. For all its meandering, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave always felt like the work of a director with a vision, a firm hand and a sense for quality. The Birth of a Nation has a powerful overarching story and a notable though all-too-brief third act, but the camerawork is forgettable (when it is not objectionable, as in the example at the top of the review), shots of hallucinations with backlit angels are beyond silly, and the performance of the actor playing the young Nat is too serious and controlled.

The director also underestimates his audience, for example when he recaps the major moments of hatred that Nat has witnessed – all of which we have seen – before burning the words of 1 Samuel 15:2 into the screen as a way to tell us that things are about to change big-time. This kind of repetition assumes the viewer has not been paying attention, even though the iniquities are always immediately apparent and often gruesome to watch. 

The Birth of a Nation has a theme and a story every bit as important as those of other major films about slavery, but the depiction is often watered down for mass consumption, the story is too slight, and the execution is too amateurish to have a great impact on the viewer. Except for telling a story that really happened but had not been brought to the screen until now, the film does not distinguish itself from its brothers and sisters and is a missed opportunity. However, it does provide a much-needed corrective to D.W. Griffith’s unabashedly racist rendering of black Americans.

Viewed at the Bratislava International Film Festival 2016.

12 Years a Slave (2013)

André Crous

While 12 Years a Slave has its share of problems moving from the page to the screen, it is a haunting film that raises the bar for all other depictions of the 19th-century South.

12-years-a-slaveUSA/UK
3.5*

Director:
Steve McQueen
Screenwriter:
John Ridley
Director of Photography:
Sean Bobbitt

Running time: 135 minutes

The most famous shot in Gaspar Noë’s agonising Irréversible shows a woman in an underground passage in Paris being raped while the camera remains nearly static in front of her, and we helplessly watch her face as she endures relentless brutality. There is a similar shot near the beginning of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, in which we see the formerly freeman Solomon Northup strapped in chains to the floor of a small cell, kneeling towards a barred opening in the wall and being beaten again and again – so hard, in fact, that the implements break upon his back – by a slave owner who bought him from money-hungry kidnappers.

While not without its minor faults, the film is a powerful portrayal of one man’s journey into slavery and is a much-needed improvement over other films in recent years that dealt with the unequal rights of African Americans in U.S. history, such as The Butler.

This adaptation of the real-life Northup’s autobiographical tale relates in great detail how he was a freeman but was likely drugged and sold into slavery, shipped to plantations in Louisiana and had to spend 12 gruelling years (most of them under the whip of a vicious plantation owner named Epps) as someone’s property in conditions that are equally inhuman.

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Northup, who has to take the name “Platt” during a slave auction and is stuck with the name for the rest of his time as a slave. Ejiofor’s portrayal of his character, very evidently guided by McQueen’s firm hand, is subtle but consistent, and the film’s ending is a magnificent display of the emotional power that is unleashed when anticipation meets catharsis – with Northup at the centre.

This being a McQueen film, the visuals are breathtaking and slightly unconventional. He is fond of shots that last longer than they would in most other films, and while the beating of Northup, described above, is the most evident example, another impressive shot is the static shot showing the aftermath of an attempted lynching. The horror of the scene is stunningly underscored by the daily activities on the farm continuing to take place as if the victim – straining his neck to free him from the noose – wasn’t even present and struggling for his life. Some viewers may be put off by the use of a few of these lingering shots, as they very often serve to pause rather than emphasise, with the striking exception of this excruciating post-lynching portrait.

The film opens halfway through the story, with Northup trying to fashion a writing implement to no avail and rebuffing the nocturnal advances of a girl who sleeps next to him in the tiny wooden slave cabin.

We then flash back to his life as a free citizen of the northern states, where he lives with his wife and two young children and makes his living as an accomplished violinist. He is called upon by two mysterious gentlemen who promise him great financial reward, and together they travel southward, where he is taken captive in the dark of night, having knocked back too many glasses of alcohol in celebration of his big journey to Washington, D.C. He wakes up in a slave pen, chained, naked and alone, and he has to deny his own status as a freeman.

In Northup’s memoir, he soon impresses with his skills as a violinist, but the film changes this detail in order to establish a bond between Northup and his first owner, William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who seems like a man he can trust to set him free. However, Ford’s unwillingness or powerlessness is revealed in two wonderful interactions (between Northup and Ford; and Northup and fellow slave Eliza), neither of which features in the novel, that make clear Ford’s wilful blindness even while we still share Northup’s view of him as a man whom we can call noble in many other respects.

12 Years a Slave is a very faithful cinematic adaptation of the eponymous novel, although it has its share of modifications, two of which stand out: The first concerns the scene in which Northup is chased through the swamp and has to hide from the bloodhounds. It has been omitted from the film, which is a shame, as it was without a doubt the most riveting scene of the entire book.

The second regards the story’s point of view. As the novel was written in the first person, Northup always made it clear which events he experienced with his own body and which ones he learned about from someone else. We had complete faith in Northup when he told the story from his perspective, and we believed the other stories because he believed them. Northup is in almost every single scene of McQueen’s film, but the inclusion of a scene in which he is not present at all – the late-night rape of the young Patsy (Lupita Nyong’o) by the plantation owner Epps (Michael Fassbender) – make no sense beyond upping our indignation, which by that stage has already reached fever pitch. The terror, violence and disrespect inflicted on Northup are enough to get our empathy: We didn’t need McQueen deploying other characters to mine our souls for pity.

But while the focus could have been tighter and the scenes stitched together more smoothly (indications of the passage of time also would have been helpful, although perhaps this frustration with chronological orientation is exactly what the director intended), the direction is firm, and the effect on the audience is at times devastating. The storyline involving Patsy – particularly those scenes in which Northup is also present, and we can see his reaction to the injustice committed against this young woman whom Epps’s wife despises because of her beauty – is heartrending and produces a very successful depiction of what the book merely mentions in passing.

12 Years a Slave is McQueen’s third film as a director (following Hunger and Shame) and is his best attempt yet to fuse his artistic sensibility with more commercial narrative demands.