A prize-winning dramatist who uses lower-case typeface to address capital-letter issues of racial and social injustice, debbie tucker green adapts her own 2018 London theatre hit ear for eye for this, her second foray into cinema directing. A highly regarded figure in black British theatre, green’s reputation attracts A-list talent. Idris Elba co-starred in her debut film Second Coming (2014) while both the stage and screen versions of ear for eye feature Lashana Lynch, currently riding high as the new 007 in No Time To Die.
World premiered on the big screen at the London Film Festival simultaneously with its BBC television launch, ear for eye feels more inventive than just a filmed play. Though she retains many of the original stage cast, green has streamlined the text and added some striking visual effects. For those beyond the reach of the BBC’s iPlayer streaming service, this timely ensemble drama will likely travel to other festivals and screening outlets. Lynch’s rising profile, plus heavyweight producer credits for James Bond franchise boss Barbara Broccoli and Fiona Lamptey, recently appointed as UK features director for Netflix, should help attract a wider global audience.
Largely composed of choppy, staccato, back-and-forth dialogue that often channels the galvanising energy of rap, ear for eye has a punchy rhythm and a bracingly experimental edge. Full sentences are truncated, meaning implied, subtext hangs heavy in the air. Like Harold Pinter or David Mamet in their prime, green understands that language is frequently a function of power, and that unspoken words often cut deepest.
The opening chapter features a series of interwoven vignettes in which African-Americans and black Britons discuss urgent personal and political issues, from the correct approach to Black Lives Matter-era protest to the painfully cautious body language young males must adopt to avoid police harassment. While the transatlantic voices often echo each other, the generations frequently clash, notably in a prickly exchange between a young radical (Tosin Cole) and his his older mentor (Danny Sapani) about the best way to fight racist oppression. Is broad compromise and slow progress better than angry, all-out resistance? “You want a slice,” Cole’s unnamed character sneers, “I want the whole fucking pie.”
The film’s midsection is the most formally conventional, but also the most effective. Sporting electric blue hair and Americanised accent, Lynch plays the younger colleague (or perhaps student) of an arrogant white male academic (Demetri Goritsas), the pair locked in percussive verbal sparring about lethal school shootings and their underlying causes. He repeatedly insists the perpetrators are apolitical “lone wolf” killers, often from broken families, depressed and disaffected. Like a fleet-footed prize-fighter, she dances around his defensive wall of words, jabbing away, landing the occasional left hook. “I didn’t come here to be a problem”, she insists in the face of accusations that she is making the debate too “personal” and “emotional”. But slowly she names the elephants lurking in the room: white supremacy, structural racism, angry white males radicalised online into violent terrorists.
This furious two-hander plays like a like a subversive remix of Mamet’s stage play Oleanna, but with Lynch’s underdog winning the moral high ground over Goritsas’s obsequious, manipulative, mansplaining authority figure. It is hardly an evenly matched fight, since she is plainly the righteous warrior for truth and he the shifty villain, but their stand-off is a stark lesson in how innocuous-sounding language is routinely deployed as a weapon of mass obstruction. Adding to the impact of this charged duologue is Christopher Melgram’s starkly minimal set, a revolving cluster of office furniture framed by high-resolution video screens ablaze with lyrical close-ups of shattering, blue-tinted glass.
Serving as a kind of origin story for the contemporary mini-dramas that have just unfolded, the closing section of ear for eye features a montage of filmed spoken-word clips. The speakers are mostly non-professionals, with Americans reading racial segregation laws from various US states in the late 19th and early 20th century, followed by Brits reciting the brutal slave codes enforced by the British Empire in its Caribbean colonies. We may feel we already comprehend the horrors of slavery from history books and movies, but hearing the legally sanctioned torture and murder of black people so precisely delineated in matter-of-fact legal language is still an ugly shock, even centuries later.
Like its stage predecessor, ear for eye has a cumbersome, disjointed structure which sometimes weakens its overall emotional impact. The final section is more reportage than drama, and could perhaps have been incorporated more smoothly into green’s cinematic makeover. That said, transfer to film allows for some inspired visual trickery that enhances the dramatic source material, such as characters engaged in heated dialogue with multiple versions of themselves, or stepping outside the scene to observe their own conversations from afar. Music also plays a key background presence, with Luke Sutherland’s mournful score augmented by a classy mixtape of transatlantic tracks from Little Simz, FKA Twigs, Run The Jewels and more.
Director, screenwriter: debbie tucker green
Cast: Lashana Lynch, Carmen Munroe, Tosin Cole, Hayden McLean, Sharlene Whyte, Danny Sapani, Kayla Meikle, Jade Anouka, Ronke Adekoluejo, Danielle Vitalis, Sule Rimi, Nadine Marshall, Jamal Ajala, Arinze Kene, Rochelle Rose, Nakhane, Demetri Goritsas
Producer: Fiona Lamptey
Executive producers: Rose Garnett, Farhana Bhula, Barbara Broccoli, Debbie Tucker Green
Cinematography: Luciana Riso, Joel Honeywell
Editing: Mdhamiri A Nkemi
Production design: Christopher Melgram
Music: Luke Sutherland
Production companies: Fruit Tree Media (UK), BBC Film (UK)
World sales: Fruit Tree Media
Venue: BFI London Film Festival (Debate section)
In English
83 minutes
