“Maybe you are asking yourself what the fuck this is? Is it a poet’s idea of a dream?”
That’s a line from Neptune Frost, which premiered at Cannes last year and has just screened at Sundance. The film is a cinematic mishmash of genres, messaging, and music. And the line is a self-conscious one: there is indeed a poet at the helm of things. That’s Saul Williams, popular slam poet and one-half of the film’s directing team. The other half is Anisia Uzeyman, who is also the DP. Williams is responsible for the film’s screenplay and music.
What this translates to on the screen is something musical, in its poetic visual rhythms, and musical, as in the film genre. It truly begins when Tekno, a labourer at a mine, is killed by a guard for, one guesses, staring mystically at a stone he hoists away from his body and above his head. Faced with this tragedy, his brother Mata (short for Matalusa and played by Bertrand Ninteretse) ferries the corpse away.
Later that night, a preacher comes to console him. Things turn amorous and for that reason the preacher gets smashed in the face. Mata flees, taking a boat elsewhere. Before he flees, he dreams a colourful dream where he is admonished to “hack…hack…hack” into what seems like everything: ownership, property laws, religion, etc. It is markedly different in other ways, but this episode provides a framework for the film that is quite similar to The Matrix and its hackers seeking to infiltrate (or obliterate) established systems. You may have heard of it. As with Neo, Mata, too, finds it all a bit weird at first. Is it a dream? Is it real? The viewer’s position is slightly different: what the heck? Around this time, the question that begins this review offers itself as a way for the film to break the fourth wall.
So, yes, this is one of those very clever films that can be admired but are difficult to love on anything more than an abstract level. It is both laudable but frustrating, since there appears to be quite a lot of important things that get drowned in the poetry of things. We begin with Mata but at a certain point we lose him (or do we?) We follow a being (Cheryl Isheja) that at least one man believes is a woman, which leads to a romantic scene with a climax (or anti-climax) that recalls that unforgettable scene from 1992’s The Crying Game. It is not quite as shocking, but then Neptune Frost is not a film about shocks. It is the dream of a poet with a conscious heart. It calls out Black oppression and seeks to show a different path to liberation. How practical is it? Um, are poets practical people?
Does it succeed on purely cinematic and narrative terms? In one way, yes. It is good to look at. But its success comes with an asterisk, given how familiar its core narrative shape is to anyone with a casual acquaintance with forms popularised by Western storytellers. Is Afro Tourism, then, inevitably tied to Western structures? It would seem so, but then again, stories are stories.
In any case, a main issue offscreen is budget and how it affects what happens on the screen. This manifests, in Neptune Frost, as an interesting tension between the technological advance of the imagined other world and the inescapably rustic aesthetic of the environment. One can attribute this incongruity to either budgetary constraints or as a reflection of the way most entities view Africa, the Blackest continent in the real world. What does it say to anyone watching that even in an imagined world, there is still a whiff of the lack that bedevils the continent in real life?
As the story progresses, some of its head-scratching parts become clearer. We understand why Mata disappears and reappears, we get the reasoning behind the perplexing greeting “Unanimous Goldmine”, we even understand what Tekno (short for Technology, get it?) was up to at the point of his death. This suggests that the viewer would have to stick around for her reward and maybe see the film again for some clarity. Thankfully, she would be won over by the film’s music, which is engaging throughout its runtime. The upshot of all of this is a film that will win admiration at art house cinemas and other cerebral venues and find its natural home wherever the politics of race is discussed. The filmmakers have spoken about the possibility of another film. If that happens, for a wider viewership Williams and Uzeyman may need to substantially increase the budget. Hack, hack, hack film financing? You bet!
Directors: Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams
Screenwriter, composer: Saul Williams
Cast: Bertrand Ninteretse, Cheryl Isheja, Eliane Umuhire, Dorcy Rugamba, Rebecca Mucyo, Trésor Niyongabo, Eric Ngangare, Natacha Muziramakenga and Cécile Kayirebwa
Producers: Ezra Miller, Stephen Hendel, Dave Guenette, Maria Judice
Executive producers: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Stephen Hendel, Ekaterina Baker, Juliette Pryor, Walter Pryor
Cinematography: Anisia Uzeyman
Film Editing: Anisha Acharya
Production Design: Cedric Mizero, Antoine Nshimiyimana
Production companies: 5000 Broadway Productions (U.S.), Carte Blanche (U.S.)
World sales: Kino Lorber
Venue: Sundance Film Festival
In Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, French, English
105 minutes
