Sinners’ Delivers and Then Some

Giv­en the uni­ver­sal rev­er­ence Sin­ners has been afford­ed, and the fact that the trail­er promised a bog-stan­dard vam­pire flick direct­ed by some­one whose pre­vi­ous cou­ple of efforts had been at the behest of the Mar­vel brethren, I sat down to watch Sin­ners with min­i­mal expec­ta­tions, con­fi­dent that I’d be get­ting back up to leave after about 30 min­utes or so. How refresh­ing to be proved so thor­ough­ly wrong.

Nom­i­nal­ly, we’re in Clarks­dale, Mis­sis­sip­pi, but real­ly we’re in the same ter­rain that gave us Damon Lindelof’s scin­til­lat­ing Watch­men (reviewed by me ear­li­er here) and Scorsese’s deeply irre­spon­si­ble Killers of the Flower Moon (reviewed by me ear­li­er here).

This is a world where hon­est, hard-work­ing black and brown skinned peo­ple are robbed blind by their white neigh­bours, deter­mined as they are to per­sist with their delu­sion of racial supe­ri­or­i­ty. Sin­ners, then, is a revenge movie.

Iden­ti­cal twins come home with the ill-got­ten gain they’ve amassed after work­ing for the Chica­go mafia, bent on open­ing up a juke joint so that their black and brown skinned broth­ers and sis­ters can enjoy them­selves of an evening, in exact­ly the same way that their white neigh­bours can.

But that is not a world that those white neigh­bours are will­ing to allow come into being.

As with any supe­ri­or genre film, it’s what you see going on beneath the sur­face that ele­vates it. Inge­nious­ly, direc­tor Ryan Coogler homes in on music as the means for dis­tin­guish­ing the film’s two antagonists.

Once the film set­tles down, the lines seem to be clear­ly drawn. Inside the juke joint are our heroes, the black and brown skinned men and women per­form­ing and entranced by the devil’s music, the delta blues. And on the out­side, and try­ing to get in, are the blood-suck­ing vam­pires, who are con­gre­gat­ed with­out, lis­ten­ing to their music.

And yet, things are far murki­er than first they seem. The music that the 12th cen­tu­ry Irish vam­pire leads them on is every bit as majes­tic as the music with­in, and is clear­ly viewed that way by the film mak­ers who frame it so lovingly.

The gor­geous, del­i­cate Will You Go Lassie Go is even­tu­al­ly super­seded by the rol­lick­ing on The Rocky Road to Dublin, which is clear­ly intend­ed as the coun­ter­point for those out­side, to the regal I Lied to You, which rep­re­sents the apoth­e­o­sis of the blues for the peo­ple with­in, link­ing as it does the delta blues to hip hop via Hendrix.

The point being, the one is not her­ald­ed at the expense of the oth­er, both are cel­e­brat­ed equally.

And the fact that the vam­pire had orig­i­nal­ly come from 12th cen­tu­ry Ire­land mat­ters. That makes him a man who, before he’d been ‘cap­tured’, had orig­i­nal­ly been rebelling against the only recent­ly arrived Eng­lish, in exact­ly the same way that these 20th cen­tu­ry black Amer­i­cans have been forced to rebel against the all too recent real­i­ty of slavery. 

So there is as much that con­nects them as there is that divides them. In oth­er words, this is a cin­e­mat­ic world that is any­thing but black and white.

The same thing hap­pens with the film’s end­ing – and if you’re wor­ried about spoil­ers, stop read­ing here and come back after you’ve watched it. But we are talk­ing about good ver­sus evil, and the con­ven­tions around that are fair­ly unsurprising.

On the sur­face, good tri­umphs over evil and the bad­dies get their come­up­pance. But that’s not the feel­ing you come away with when you find your­self think­ing about the way the end­ing unfolds.

It’s the good­ies, the blacks with­in, who are over­come by the whites with­out, and who are even­tu­al­ly forced to inte­grate with them, by join­ing them. But how could it have been oth­er­wise, giv­en the intox­i­cat­ing nature of the siren sounds the vam­pires were send­ing forth? And after all, Irish beer real­ly does taste won­der­ful, even if it does dull the sens­es and cloud the mind.

So all they are left with, ulti­mate­ly, is their music, the blues. Every­thing else has been appro­pri­at­ed. Which is where the film ends up, with its post-cred­its end­ing. It’s not so much a revenge film then, as it is a film of failed revenge.

Except it isn’t. That’s how the film’s sto­ry ends. But the very exis­tence of a film like this is that revenge deliv­ered. Crewed and cast and from the per­spec­tive of black peo­ple, with black sig­ni­fy­ing good, strong, and hero­ic, and white evil, threat­en­ing, destruc­tive and preda­to­ry, the film visu­al­ly recal­i­brates the dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tions of black and white we were pre­sent­ed with in Spike Lee’s Mal­colm X.

With­out force feed­ing us clum­sy sym­bol­ism, and with­out ever for­get­ting to enter­tain us along the way, the very exis­tence of Sin­ners rep­re­sents a small but mon­u­men­tal step in that nec­es­sary path to revenge.

Change has come, at last.

Watch the trail­er for Sin­ners here:

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Parasite; mmnah

Par­a­site.

There’s noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly wrong with Par­a­site, the sev­enth film from South Kore­an film mak­er Bong Joon-ho. And, had it arrived under the radar, as it were, much as his fourth film, Moth­er, did in 2009, then very prob­a­bly it could have been for­giv­en its many glar­ing inconsistencies.

Sure, it’s about half an hour too long. And, like Moth­er (not to be con­fused with Dar­ren Aronofsky’s exe­crable Moth­er!, with an excla­ma­tion mark, reviewed by me ear­li­er here), it can’t make up its mind whether it’s a dark com­e­dy, a creepy thriller, or a social satire – cant it be all three, you ask? On which, more anon. 

Depar­dieu in Les Valseuses.

And sure, it’s the sort of film that Bertrand Bli­er was mak­ing eons ago, but with much more verve and brio. Films like Les Valseuses (limply trans­lat­ed as Going Places) from 1974, Buf­fet froid from ’79 and Tenue de soirée from ’86. All of which starred Gérard Depar­dieu in all his pomp, and which all dis­played, not to put too fine a point on it, con­sid­er­ably more balls.

But it didn’t. Par­a­site arrived gar­land­ed, anoint­ed and ver­i­ly fes­tooned, blaz­ing a trail of un-checked praise.

That it should have won the Acad­e­my award for Best Film is very much par for the course. It’s exact­ly the sort of skin deep, un-demand­ing social satire that the Acad­e­my likes to pat itself on the back for applaud­ing. What’s much more sur­pris­ing is that they should have giv­en the nod to the gen­uine­ly edgy Moon­light (reviewed by me here) three years previously.

Tim Rob­bins in The Play­er.

But it’s baf­fling that the grown ups at Cannes should have been equal­ly wowed, albeit in a par­tic­u­lar­ly weak year. Mind you, they gave the Palme d’Or to The Square in 2017, which was sim­i­lar­ly unfocused.

So, what’s wrong with being a dark com­e­dy, a creepy thriller, and a social satire? Well, noth­ing. It can be done, as with Scorsese’s The King of Com­e­dy (’82), David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (‘90) and Twin Peaks (’92- present) and Robert Altman’s The Long Good­bye (‘73) and The Play­er (‘92). All of which of course were com­plete­ly over­looked by the Academy. 

You just need to answer the three fun­da­men­tal ques­tions that all sto­ries must answer; whose sto­ry is it? What do they want? And what’s stop­ping them?

The Long Good­bye,

So whose sto­ry is being told in Par­a­site? To begin with, it’s the son’s. Then, 20 min­utes in, it switch­es to his sis­ter. Then his father. Then it’s a mix of all four, their moth­er now join­ing them. Before final­ly revert­ing to the son once more. This does not pro­duce a whim­si­cal mix­ing of gen­res and a delight­ful flit­ting hith­er and thith­er. It’s all just a bit of a mess.

If we don’t know whose sto­ry it is, we can’t know what they want, and what there­fore is stop­ping them from get­ting it. So we’ve nobody to root for, and there’s no way for us to get emo­tion­al­ly engaged, so there’s noth­ing at stake. This is not some option­al extra. It’s the very foun­da­tion upon which all sto­ries are built.

Lau­ra Palmer, Twin Peaks.

Not that any of this should real­ly have come as a sur­prise. After all, before mak­ing Moth­er, Boon hooked up with Michel Gondry and Leos Carax, two of the most incon­se­quen­tial and insub­stan­tial film mak­ers to have ever come out of France, to make Tokyo! (08) together.

Let’s hope nobody intro­duces poor Boon to Ter­rence Mal­ick and the afore­men­tioned Aronof­sky, America’s answer to messers Gondry and Carax. Per­ish the thought.

You can see the trail­er for Par­a­site here.

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