To see at the cinema: “Banzo”, “Ernest Cole, photographer”, “Planet B”, “Pretty pretty”

Christmas is trash. We are not paraphrasing here Santa Claus is trash: we see that the date of December 25, the last Wednesday of the year, serves as a dump where an unusual number of titles pile up which have not found a place in the permanent traffic jam that distribution in France has become.

Sometimes, in the trash, we find treasures. So, first of all, two remarkable films, which we would like to believe that the fact of concerning black people has no link with their calendar relegation, are on display. Fiction set in the Portuguese colonies at the beginning of the 20th century^e century or documentary on a South African photographer from the 1960s-80s, they are for the first the opportunity to discover a filmmaker, for the second the opportunity to put a forgotten artist back in the light.

It turns out that Banzo et Ernest Cole, photographer also have in common that they share the same attention to the resources, partly common and partly different, of cinema and photography.

Two French genre films were then released on Christmas Day which, with great inventiveness even if in very different tones – dystopian science fiction, musical comedy – confirm the creative vigor of cinema in this country. And how much genre codes can nourish singular propositions.

«Banzo» by Margarida Cardoso

The wife of the plantation owner said: “Soon it will make a story. And I will be a character in this story. It’s nice, becoming a character.” Soon, she will return to Lisbon, to the good society from which she comes, where she will be able to shine by telling what she experienced. The stories, the characters, are for there.

Here, in this never-named island (Sao Tomé), there is neither story nor character: there is work, heat, rain, slavery disguised as a contract, bureaucracy, boredom, despair . The possible, desirable character was perhaps this tall black man with tattoos and pride. But he fell dead in the first sequence, within sight of the coast of the island.

About this man, who was perhaps her lover, and the causes of his death, the white doctor who comes to take up his duties at the cocoa plantation infirmary has nothing to say. Can’t say anything. He will do his job, conscientiously useless in the face of regulated and civilized violence, in the face of banzo, the disease of Mozambican workers who are dying of nostalgia for the country from which they were torn away.

Shot after shot, with a gentleness more cutting than all the brutality of filming, instilling a poisonous beauty and yet respectful of beings, humans, animals, plants, meteors, ghosts, Margarida Cardoso invents a way of filming colonialism like a poison.

A Portuguese filmmaker who grew up in Mozambique, she finds in the relationship to places – jungle and seashore, masters’ homes, administrative premises and miserable buildings – a material all the more imbued with meaning and imagination as she does not subject herself not “a story”.

Staging a ceremonial which, claiming to mask colonial oppression, materializes it in spite of itself, thanks to the subtle use of shots by photographer Alphonse, mirroring the director of the film. | Damned Distribution

From then on, possible stories, legends known or not, reminiscences can emerge, swarm. The white doctor, aware of his powerlessness, and the black photographer, who in order to make perceptible the horror of which In the heart of darkness but also restoring a singularity to the mass of oppressed people claiming to stage clichés, are partial relays.

They participate in the great invocation, deliberately fragmentary, which becomes Banzowhose title designates this deleterious disease which decimates women and men forced to work, but which, indirectly, does not spare others.

Through the composition of images and rhythms, what it shows and what it does not show, the film makes sensitive the colonial phenomenon as a pathology, from which everyone suffers, even if in an absolutely incomparable way between who is its victim. and who benefits from it.

Hieratic and mute, living or ghosts, the black men and women who refused the domination of the colonists, or who escaped from it, silently embody, a little witness, a little victim, more resistant, the mental and political space constructed by the filmmaker, with a captivating elegance.

“Ernest Cole, Photographer” by Raoul Peck

How is this possible? A sense of astonishment and disbelief permeates the beginning of the film. Incredible that the one whose new achievement of Raoul Peck bears the name.

Incredible, the situation of oppression and caricatured injustice in which he grew up, and worked until the age of 27, this aberrant system that we called apartheid – and which continues to exist, elsewhere, in partly different forms.

One of Ernest Cole’s photos in apartheid South Africa. | Condor Films

Incredible, the compact brutality of the racism that Ernest Cole encountered during his exile in the United States. Incredible his homelessness, which led to his death in 1990, at only 50 years old. And incredible, too, this treasure of 60,000 negatives found in a Swedish bank in 2017, twenty-seven years after his death – and when the production of the film had already begun.

While reformulating according to the archives and discoveries, this surprise and this confusion, this incomprehension and this scandal run throughout the film. That is to say throughout the voice-over which in the same movement arouses the different levels of this palimpsest film, and connects them.

A voice that says “I”, an “I” which is simultaneously that of the South African photographer whose images have powerfully contributed to making known the abject violence which reigned in his country, the “I” of the director, of whom little is recognized little bit of the voice, and also a little bit of the “I” of each spectator.

This is where the strange power of this film unfolds, which is a story of the life and death of a great photographer and anti-racist fighter, and which is much more than a biography. With Ernest Cole, photographera disturbing meditation on the strengths and weaknesses of images, Raoul Peck revives the photographer’s journey, but also the memory of the great documentary filmmaker that he is.

Seven years ago, the deserved success of I Am Not
Your Negro recorded the recognition, but as soon as Haitian Corner
(1988) et Lumumba, death of a prophet (1990), the Haitian filmmaker demonstrated his ability to each time invent a unique documentary language, in phase with a situation, a story.

This is again the case regarding the fate of the author of the book House
of Bondage who, in 1967, played an important role in the perception of apartheid, and the mobilizations abroad which made it possible to support the struggle of the ANC.

By delving into the archives, images and texts, and by meeting witnesses to the painful journey of Ernest Cole, Raoul Peck constructs more than a story: an environment, incandescent and painful, which alongside the rebellious photographer, then exiled and destroyed by exile, makes perceptible a state of the world, past and present.

“Planet B” by Aude Léa Rapin

From the outset, the dystopia works. In 2039, this near world saturated with surveillance devices, this control company announced for half a century and of which we already know more than the premises, has generated the inevitable radicalization of those who seek to create an alternative.

This context, and the brutality of the repression, combine realism and a slightly futuristic shift without needing to add much in the gadgets. The tense staging ofAude Léa Rapin and the lively performance of Adèle Exarchopoulos provide most of the credibility of this barely futuristic fable.

The group of young activists therefore gets cornered by the cyber-marechaussee and its drone squads. They find themselves in what every environmental activist once proclaimed does not exist: Planet B.

Which, in fact, does not exist, except as a virtual prison, with the appearance of an enchanting resort, a luxury hotel on a dream beach, a tool of incarceration and refined psychological torture. Anti-authoritarian and ecological fable, Planet B is also a parable of the oppressive powers of the virtual, explicitly designated as a prison through the use by the police of headsets. virtual reality.

Revealed five years ago with Heroes never diewhich combined attention to the real world and a sense of the fantastic, the filmmaker demonstrates even better a sense of storytelling which combines a sense of twists and turns, the ability to cultivate verisimilitude and shifting the stakes. She succeeds in a political-fiction SF thriller which is also a disturbing game on reality and its images, power and belief. So onto the cinema.

“Pretty pretty” by Diastema

It will be a love story. It will be a musical. It will be a variation in homage to Jacques Demy, without quotation or repetition. There will be misunderstandings and reconciliations.

It’s happy, nice, without much consequence. Very quickly it becomes clear that, skilfully written and playing with humor on the artifices of the setting and the conventions of the rose-tinted novel, Pretty pretty will fit, or not, on his music. Signed Alex Beaupainalso co-writer with Diastème, she is absolutely delightful, and, according to the established formula, wins the piece.

Experienced composer and lyricist often appreciated, notably for his collaborations with Christophe Honoré since his beginnings, in particular Love Songs or The Beloved, Beaupain seems here to find or rediscover the kind of playful and necessary evidence that once made up the golden age of the Hollywood musical.

With diverse aims and very uneven successes, the use of musical pieces has returned in force in recent films, particularly French ones. Most often, the formula seemed forced, if not manipulative. Nothing like this with the thwarted romance of the shy and uninspired writer played by William Lebghil and the young leading lady played by Clara Luciani.

Around her and him, the swarm of characters, who constantly seek to modify their trajectory, delight and convince, salute the great Italian cinema of the past and mobilize current colors and rhythms, offering exactly what they announce : an enchanted moment.