Peter Bogdanovich is another director I’ve never seen anything from before. Associated with Orson Welles, he was heavily featured in They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. The film was also the debut of Cybill Shepherd. It was filmed in black and white, an unusual decision for the time apparently made after discussing it with Welles. Indeed the whole film, set as it is in the 1950s, feels like it belongs in a different era and right off of the pages of a novel.
This film was released in 2019, which means that the project must have started at least a year or two before that. Yet events that need not be mentioned this year have made it so cogent that it feels almost too raw and too potent to watch today. It is frequently described as the black Bonnie and Clyde and the film itself even drops that line, but it is so much more than that and intelligently uses the reference to demonstrate how differently black people are viewed and treated.
I love watching films from countries whose cinema I’ve had no prior exposure to as everything seems so fresh and novel and there’s a wonderful feeling that anything is possible. This is truer than usual for this Senegalese film, the directorial debut of its woman director Mati Diop. Diop was born in France but it seems that her family is a fairly prominent one in Senegal and this certainly feels both authentic and powerful to me.
I’ve been trying to be more up to date on current science-fiction books and this is one of the most talked about ones recently. It is the debut novel of its author, Rivers Solomon, who self-identifies using the pronoun they and them, and indeed many of the characters in it have atypical genders. I was also attracted to its premise of reimagining the scenario of black slaves in the America South on board a generation ship. In the end however I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would as it leans so heavily on its inspirational sources that it’s barely much of a story on its own.
So I finally got around to watching this because, hey, it was directed by Michael Mann. This turned out to be a disaster that is completely unindicative of the work that he is capable of. I was never a fan of the television show this was based on but from what I know this film has no relationship with the show beyond the shared name. I really do not understand what Mann thought he was doing with this film.
This is a rather obscure film, set in Norway and with dialogue in English, Norwegian and a smattering each of Mandarin and German. Yet the director Rob Tregenza is American. It’s also meant as a showcase for the poetry of Norwegian poet Tarjei Vesaas which limits its potential audience even more. Though it’s a beautiful film and I’m receptive to its message, my unfamiliarity with the poetry makes it difficult to forge a strong emotional connection with it.
