Soleil Ô

It's important to play an active role, to take part, to add your voice, racial discrimination is an unsettling reality that consistently frustrates able bodied workers.

It's wonderful to see when citizens engage and write books or direct films to help struggling minorities, a lot of genuine sympathy and sincere care diligently goes into their compassionate construction.

Soleil Ô follows the plight of African migrants who move to France in the post-colonial period, but it wasn't made by concerned French citizens, it was created by Africans themselves.

According to the colonialist dogma they had been brought up with, they were equal citizens in France, and were surprised to find a lack and housing and employment after they picked up one day and moved there.

The film experiments with narrative techniques as it explores various aspects of racist tensions, which still pop up with alarming regularity there's still so much work to be critically done.

Back in Africa for instance, the abundance of languages is thoughtfully presented, before the colonized citizens have to fight one another in English and French with crosses turned into swords.

A grouchy bigot cantankerously complains about immigration in a relaxed restaurant, before a black singer inspires the patrons and he suddenly changes his stubborn mind.

A mixed-race individual who looks white has to suddenly walk away, from an angry man who just can't help his instinctual hatred and knee-jerk prejudice.

As a white woman and a black man playfully flirt with one another on the street, passers by look on in shock and offer multiple awkward different takes.

Even though black people possess requisite skills they're still forced to work in specific sectors, many of which demand no education and involve industrial cleaning.

I would argue that Soleil Ô's multiple exploratory scenarios, present pioneering mockumentary techniques decades before they became conventional (they may have also been popular at the time but were referred to by a different term).

The comedy is instructive without being violent and there is one character who keeps showing up, the events loosely tailored around his experience as he tries to make coherent sense of things.

It effectively uses humour and logic to rationally comment on distressing realities, hopefully convincing hard-hearted peeps that there are less drastic solutions to economic problems (people shouldn't be assigned specific jobs solely based on the colour of their skin for instance).

First rate experimental cinema perhaps decades ahead of its time, courageously created by the actual citizens whom the racist attitudes affected, Soleil Ô is worth checking out by concerned multicultural citizens, especially because the same attitudes still persist, and need to be fought by the next generation. 

Chocolat

Growing up alone and isolated in a foreign nation while nestled in the country, a young child observes the inner-workings of a French colonial government.

Things generally proceed without dilemma, issue, hiccup, or re-modification, since her father's level-headed and makes Indigenous friends and local contacts.

He's gone for extended periods pursuing various governmental initiatives however, leaving his wife and child in the steady care of a clever resourceful citizen.

Who's been able to casually bridge relaxed European and African customs, with fluid evocative hands-on knowledge he feels at home wherever he goes. 

He's a jack-of-all-generational-trades and gets along well with both parents and children, like a cool open-minded and friendly babysitter who can also fix the generator or chase away hyenas.

The routine life upon the compound proceeds dependably without much uproar, although a plane lands one day nearby due to unfortunate mechanical malfunctions. 

It introduces a cast of characters representing less settled colonialist viewpoints.

Little France observes with wonder.

While the adults search for temporal occupation.

Chocolat presents a raw depiction of a select period from an atypical life, offering accounts of unfiltered memories that seemed peculiar to youth in blossom.

It's fun to watch Claire Denis's film because the narrative isn't strictly linear, there's a story that progresses throughout no doubt but it's broken up by random occurrences.

It's like a thoughtful surrealist embarkation into the innocent world of youth and playtime, in a sincere environment where the child tries to make sense of the strange conversations held by different adults.

The memories are like cool flashbacks to uncanny airs which must have seemed odd, certainly not like the familiar adventures she would have imagined with other bureaucrat children.

As it unreels, one scene after another depicts a fascinating narrative technique, where everything fits, nothing's misplaced, but the individual scenes are like mini-stories of their own.

You can pick and choose the individual tales as if you were leafing through an anthology, or watch them in succinct succession as they serpentinely structure a mischievous yarn.

Like being transported back to early childhood to freely reflect upon bewildering pastimes, the mesmerizing curious vignettes peacefully prosper through animate invention.

Held together by an African saint who can efficiently tread so many walks of life.

Unlike anything I've seen before.

Unique beauty inspired in motion. 

Charlie's Country

An aging Indigenous hunter goes about his daily business (David Gulpilil as Charlie), peacefully reacting to impositions which have radically transformed his life.

He remembers the old school ways dating back for many a millennia, and is somewhat vexed by colonial laws which often prohibit related freedoms.

Regulations manage so much of what he's traditionally trying to do, that it's like his way of life's been outlawed to his habitual astonishment.

He makes a reasonable case simply stating that it's his land, simply being annoyed by the lack of work or the lack of interest in his culture.

While viewing the film and intently listening to his passionate music, it seemed like a monstrously depressing  history, that there was so much spiritual harmony to be freely nurtured that was generally overlooked by covetous Europeans.

Imagine free spiritual exchanges had won the day with interactive correspondence respectfully matriculating, and these songs and dances were also consistent components of the greater Australian (or Canadian) scene.

And that the cultures were really interacting with mutual respect across the land. And there had never been any lost generations. No chilling grand historical barbarism.

That's the problem with uniform exposition it antiseptically sterilizes so much life, and takes vast vivacious versatile vistas and obtusely replaces them with bland monotony.

It's not even that bland monotony should be overlooked if anything it should be give a different label, and treated with mutual respect that doesn't enrage its anger-prone proponents (note: Russia is invading other countries again and Italy just elected a government that reveres Mussolini).

If one ring rules them all it really does bind them in darkness, with no grand multivariable recourse sleep takes hold with soporific blindness.

I just sort of like trying this and that there are so many different styles available out there, it's as simple as flipping through channels on the TV, or just surfing around on the radio.

I had developed this latently in my youth but Montréal really helped it bloom, I can't think of a better place in Canada and Québec to learn to ensconce yourself in diversity.

Charlie just wants to peacefully live according to the ways his people have for millennia, and while attempting to confidently do so, keeps running into violence.

This leads to a sense of desperation which is worst case if treated with alcohol.

Would you understand if someone took your country away?

Why do you expect Indigenous Peoples to?

Captive State

Chaos descends as aliens invade and overwhelm Earth's defences.

Possessing unassailable strength and intergalactically advanced technology, the planet succumbs to their rule, and must dismally embrace monstrous will.

Only a scant few escape extreme poverty, and they're self-destructively tasked with brainstorming their own ruin.

The aliens seek to extract everything the Earth has to offer, every last microbe they can voraciously steal, and what happens to its inhabitants in the meantime, is indeed of little concern.

In the opening moments, a family seeks escape, but is cut down immediately after breaking through local improvised defences.

Captive State unreels years later, the children having grown up meanwhile, each day a struggle to survive, every moment despairing combat.

The police manage relations between organic and extraterrestrial life and find themselves in a miserable position.

But William Mulligan (John Goodman) does his best to look out for troubled Gabriel (Ashton Sanders), whose father was once his partner, before everything drastically changed.

The result is first rate sci-fi, with an ending that brought me to tears.

How do you make cutting edge realistic science-fiction that doesn't heavily rely on special effects?

You contact Rupert Wyatt and his crew after synthesizing Captive State's distillations.

There are no moments in its present where you feel at ease, where there's a break from the rotting tension.

And without the visual effects, the aesthetic acrimony, knowledge of interstellar hubris, a focus on messianic maestros, the film tills biodiverse grassroots, and produces authentic desperation.

Not without hope.

Nothing utopian or grotesque or supernatural, just hope that the aliens can be defeated, or at least held in check or at bay.

Strictly confined.

It's unclear what happens in the end.

Even without the special effects, the budget's bigger than a lot of independent sci-fi, but the money was well spent on realistic settings, which augment the film's resourceless ambience.

The ending's brilliant and heartbreaking, a masterstroke of revelatory storytelling.

Takes Cloverfield up a notch.

A couple of notches.

A bunch of notches.

With Vera Farmiga (Jane Doe).

And Mr. Alan Ruck (Charles Rittenhouse).

The Legend of Tarzan

I suppose The Legend of Tarzan is an adventure film, an action film, a story, a, legend, not a penetrating critical essay examining European colonialist practices in Africa and the resultant horrors they unwittingly released.

Thus, in the final moments, as a British aristocrat who was raised in the wild by fictional mangani apes celebrates the fact that he thwarted the ruthless plans of a self-starting Belgian to brutally enslave the Congo, the entire country, human and beast alike, united behind this altruistic white man, I should have forgotten about the following century of violence and joined in the joyous festivities.

Oddly, The Legend of Tarzan is an American film that champions blue blood as opposed to hard work, the hard working risk takers's flagrant strategic planning unquestionably no match for his adversary's aesthetic environmental nobility.

In the context of the film, this is a good thing, for Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgård) succeeds and the ignominious Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz) is devoured by crocodiles, and the people of the Congo can continue to exist as they have for millennia, beholden to no one besides themselves, as Tarzan does not seek to divinely rule.

But if you dig deeper, it's more like a clever manifestation of white supremacy either way.

A no win scenario for Africans.

The evil religious one who clearly considers himself superior and wants to enslave the population is defeated by the good laissez-faire one whom everyone in the country, including the animals, regards as if he's an omniscient god.

African and American characters alike are given prominent roles within that are combatively fierce and strong.

But none are as strong as blue blood Tarzan, who is mightier than all and has therefore indirectly upheld aristocratic British class privileges.

Apart from all this, even if you overlook all of this, the film's not that great.

It starts out well, introducing characters I wanted to learn more about while establishing a narrative I wanted to eagerly follow.

But there's just way too much sentiment, too many stock characters having predictable diminutive conversations in cliché situations.

Apart from George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson) who impressed and functioned like a colonialist conscience.

It moves too quickly, the scenes that try to slow down the pace a bit and develop some character are far too short and adversarial, like the production team's trying to accelerate the interactions so you don't have time to figure out how awful they are.

A lot of cool stuff does happen with the animals and I've always dreamed of seeing an ending like The Legend of Tarzan's within a different context.

Still though, gross historical aberrations, the double white supremacist whammy, and characters relying on underdeveloped merit.

Elusive indoctrination.

Clever in its villainous duplicity.

Tabu

After sterilely establishing a set of sociological effects, wherein moments of personal literary expositions and devout religious expressions firmly respond to an extroverted eccentricity, capriciously gloating in the ether, following a solemn sentimental allegory, Miguel Gomes's Tabu imprioritizes their structural causes, by soberly elucidating their passionate progenitors.

Tabu's dimensions are difficult to define because it obliquely plays with narrative conventions with a jocose leavened degree of cohesive disparity, as if to say, "based upon certain doctrinalized expectations, there are specific aspects which we must include, even if throughout the process of their inclusion, we have found ways to romantically mistrust them."

I highly doubt they would have expressed themselves in such terms.

Sterile's the wrong word to be using. The film's anything but sterile. Yet it coyly employs a pervasive intermittently poppy sterility to slyly postulate its poetic position, as if it's trying to sustain sundry spontaneous combustions, like a ravenous crocodile.

By imprioritizing the structural causes, Tabu laments the ways in which events solidify points of view, as epitomized by Santa (Isabel Muñoz Cardoso) and Aurora's (Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira) relations, as Santa asserts herself.

Although I'm basing this point on a supposition drawn from a character's memory and then applied externally (by me) to a nondescript incidental circumstance (act II).

There's much more to it than that, if that even applies.

So worth seeing.