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Reviews
S'en fout la mort (1990)
You know it's good if it's about cockfighting and you can't look away.
The movie starts with a Chester Himes quote--a big clue to its atmosphere. Both gritty and haunting, the story concerns illegal cockfighting in France (minimal carnage), with a lot of overlaid metaphor. "Cock, man, same thing." This is a typically slow, thoughtful Claire Denis film (does any woman take on more masculine subjects?). Everything is played under the surface; in fact, the images and montage are so strong, it might as well be silent. Key motivations are implicit, not explicit. Alex Descas, as the Caribbean cock-trainer, is the soul of the movie, as a man fatally in love with another man's wife.
Boys Don't Cry (1999)
One of the most overrated movies of 1999.
Hilary Swank is brilliant--almost brilliant enough to carry this naieve interpretation of a modern tragedy. Even if you don't know the story, it is predictable, and-- worse-- maudlin as presented here. All the characters except Chloe Sevigny's are cliches, and only Swank rises above the screenplay's weaknesses.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)
Easily Jim Jarmusch's best film.
An original idea, done with humor and style, and punctuated with a very intense performance by the superb Forest Whitaker. I saw it in a packed movie house in Paris, with English subtitles (except for de Bankole's dialogue), and the French audience liked it even more than I did. The mixture of Mafia, gangsta, and samurai (with more than passing mention of Indian warriors) reveals similarities you'd never think of.
This one's worth seeing.
Hyènes (1992)
High praise for a truly accomplished film.
A stunning adaptation of Friedrich Durrenmatt's coldly brilliant play, The Visit, HYENES (hyenas) actually improves on the story by transposing the action to a Senegalese village. A fabulously wealthy old woman, who was born in the village but run out in disgrace as pregnant youth, returns and promises the villagers a fortune on one condition: that they kill the man who ruined her, an aged man who is the town's popular, good-natured grocer.
By moving the story from Durrenmatt's European setting to a dirt-poor African village, all the tensions are heightened, and the director Mambety sets the huge issues in high relief against the desert backdrop: justice, betrayal, revenge, guilt, greed (or need?), loyalty, and charity are played out in a searing (and searingly beautiful) desert, filmed with the grace of Bergman and written with the wryness of Bunuel. There are no good guys. It's up to you if there are bad guys. Everyone is a predator.
Mandabi (1968)
Qualified praise.
The pace of this movie is as languid as life in a sun-baked country. But stick with it. Even when the plot is predictable, the action is not, nor are the characters. Believing he has come into money from a successful relative in Paris (who is shown sweeping streets, far from wealthy), a proud middle-aged Dakar man with two strong-willed wives and several children tries to cash the money order (mandabi). He encounters catch-22 bureaucracies, his friends all become borrowers, his creditors turn ugly, and con men latch on to him, but Ousmane Sembene (the director, and one of Senegal's most important writers) leavens the frustration with humour, and even manages to sustain a certain amount of suspense-- not easy in a film as languid as this one. Scenes of city life in Dakar's warren like streets are realistically and straightforwardly presented, and the story, though very simple, stays with you long after the movie's over. A must if you're interested in African film, if only for historical interest.