Isaac Julien's Paradise Omeros and a midterm review.
Only 25 minutes long, Paradise Omeros evokes the displacement that black Caribbean immigrants felt in 1960s England. Inspired by Derek Walcott's epic poem Omeros, which phrased African diaspora experience in Homeric terms, the film also connects cultural alienation to the estrangement that is part of a young gay man's self-awareness. The film's rich emotional effect derives from its rich visual texture. Shooting on film, Julien gets images more opulent and palpable than any video installation. His 1989 Looking for Langston confirmed Julien's careful, elegant eye; he mimed and matched the languorous homoerotic poses of Jean-Baptise Mondino's Never Let Me Down music video for David Bowie. Paradise Omeros proves Julien's evolution into greater coherence and originality. He has finally found adroit expression for the complexities of gay identity (beyond the 80s queer rhetoric of Looking for Langston) by rooting his vision in an immigrant's wonderment.
Not since Terence Davies has a filmmaker so poignantly linked social-group awareness to the agonies of personal/sexual identity. Wandering a beach, soccer field, hallways and parking structure, young Omeros (Hansil Jules) shows spiritual displacement that reflects his community's social unease. Through precise editing and striking, huge visual representations, Julien makes past and present, tradition and change, liberty and confinement, desire and despair almost tangible. As Omeros recalls his fancily dressed relatives partying to "The Tide Is High," Julien conveys an amazing sense of the boy's innocent identification (with the men's bonhomie, the women's warmth, the sense of an immigrant world creating comfort within itself). But this working-class paradise is complicated by memories of violently repressed behavior. Possibility and despair loom so large in Julien's imagery that Omeros' conflicted condition seems constant; it is the considerable unfurling of Julien's familial anguish, a sumptuous confession of his personal politics.
Always film-savvy, Julien relates Omeros' quest to that seminal fable of spiritual and social consciousness The Night of the Hunter, but he does so by also quoting Do the Right Thing's LOVE/HATE monologue. Paradise Omeros continues Julien's modernist interest in reexamining popular culture. Here, "The Tide Is High" is not just a love song but a people's anthem, and Julien extends that struggle to the parallel quest of Omeros' love object?a young, white Brit who's also cruising, searching to belong and to connect. Julien hasn't made a feature film since 1991's Young Soul Rebels, but Paradise Omeros demonstrates the vision and sincerity of the best movies.
Chen Kaige's Together is the most encouraging pop movie so far this year even though it malingers in a marketplace unexcited by its 1) humanism, 2) classical storytelling 3) modernist craft. This is a bad sign as we go into the second half of the movie year, because a culture without those verities has a frightening future. What makes Together a pop movie (it's a touchstone of such global themes as expressive art, family, social competition) also makes it an oddity in a film culture that neglects universally recognized experience for superficial presold genres and inexpressive f/x.
This is the worst movie summer I can remember. Listing the best films of the first half of '03 catalogs ideas that are fading away, issues that are recklessly ignored: Together conveyed spiritual unity among its diverse characters. The Son puzzled at the virtue of forgiveness and social responsibility. Divine Intervention spoke back to media bias with nerve and verve. The Good Thief reimagined worldwide soul-searching in heist-movie terms. Phone Booth used action-movie tropes to probe a media pimp's psyche. Sweet Sixteen pierced the defenses of teenage brashness, while Paradise Omeros parsed adolescent alienation. Respiro rediscovered the life force in mundane behavior. Under the Skin of the City did the same for Iran. Biker Boyz eroticized the urban search for role models. Madame Sata nearly radicalized biography with genuine ambivalence; The Confusion of Genders did the same for an actor's autobiography. The Girl from Paris and Bend It Like Beckham, respectively, gave delicate and raucous views of culture clash.
None of these movies commanded the major media attention lavished upon Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Terminator 3, Finding Nemo, The Matrix Reloaded, Legally Blonde 2: Red White & Blonde, 28 Days Later?films that shame an industry run by educated adults. But the craven attitude of those adults is only encouraged by the media's insistence on the commercial aspect of movies. Blame the press for making the insanity of Sequel Summer seem logical?or acceptable.
Movie culture is going through onerous changes. As commercial risks diminish, as film gets gradually phased out for video, the very qualities that made movies special (an "art" if you please) are forgotten. The more movies become like tv, the less exciting they are visually. New technology has allowed facility to replace skill, concept, craft; the rubric that now anybody can make a movie means few people bother to do so meticulously. Television-bred audiences are inured to the difference, while television-bred film reviewers accustom themselves to the degradation.
Embracing Paradise Omeros or Model Shop is not being contrary but fighting against the dismantling of film culture that now seems to be the only option Hollywood?and the media?provides. Our best instincts go undernourished at the movies. The films that get talked or written about are the movies not worth talking about. Movie culture has become preoccupied with trivia. Recently a tv-panel discussion on Bend It Like Beckham (the comedy about a teenage Sikh girl infatuated with British soccer idol Dave Beckham that deals intimately with Anglo-Asian assimilation) quickly dismissed it as nothing more than a variation of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Even though two panelists were East Asian, the commentary was limited to commercial blather because the trend is not to relate to movies personally, honestly or thoughtfully. When the Sikh girl falls in love with a white boy and shrugs off their differences as "It's just culture," her plea for deeper understanding has been limited to formula.
The slippery slope became a free-fall last winter when Chicago promotion overwhelmed any actual reaction (largely by hype that precluded critical thought). This is what "hegemony" means. Film companies preordain blockbusters by creating an atmosphere in which blockbusters are unilaterally accepted. I know reviewers whose only brain work goes into parroting or corroborating press kits. Under the guise of enjoying movies, people have taken to uncritically patronizing them. That's the calamity of the film and media industries conspiring to greater commercial effectiveness. "Culture" gets built on advertising rather than art.
A newsmagazine review that praised Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle as "instantly forgettable fun" confused the concepts of fun and memory, condoning Hollywood insubstantiality by making crap seem acceptable. One esteemed reviewer wrote that "a high-tech fairytale with no redeeming social value comes as a welcome relief." It doesn't matter which of the past dozen Hollywood movies he was writing about, this giving in was, in fact, giving up?acquiescing to the whole meretricious system. Humorless social nostrums aren't the goal; I want my time spent in the dark redeemed.
Can we find a more profound need for movies than simply becoming pop consumers? Resisting the film industry's contempt recalls the exchange in David Mamet's State and Main when a screenwriter snidely congratulates a small-town woman: "You guys make your own fun around here." The woman answers, "Everybody makes their own fun. If they don't, it's not fun, it's entertainment."