Tommy Guns

There aren’t too many accounts of the time just before and just after the independence of several African countries across the 1960s and 1970s. But we can assume that it must have been a tense time, given the upending of colonial structures. How did locals react to the news that the power structure they grew up under was changing, that soon enough they would be the masters of their own destiny, if only nominally?

One answer is given in the opening moments of Carlos Conceição’s Tommy Guns (Nação Valente):  with violence. We see a group of young men chase a clergywoman from her home in the year before Angola acquired independence. For the literary minded, the sequence might recall a late incident in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. In that book, a woman also suffers a violent act designed as revenge on the outgoing colonial order in South Africa, a country linked to Angola by some geography and at least two wars.

Almost a half-hour into Tommy Guns, after a shocking act of violence once more against a woman, the title card appears, marking a semi-departure from the previous act. The story settles on a group of armed young soldiers led by a mean-faced colonel. They live in what appears to be a large clearing hemmed in by bushes. And for large parts of the film, this mix of youth and guns remains tense. The soldiers engage in some shenanigans but we never really know who they are, except for Ze (Joao Arrais), who becomes the film’s focal character.

It is he who is given the order to shoot a “traitor” who has left the band of soldiers but is pursued into the bush, allowing cinematographer Vasco Viana to work his night-time magic. The pursuit can only end in tragedy but Viana films it beautifully, his camera super-mobile and its visuals pellucid. The aftermath of the execution steers Tommy Guns down a nightmarish path conveyed using horror tropes. Yet the slow chemistry of youth and guns abides, until sex is introduced—or until heterosexual lust approaches the troupe of testosterone. At that point, things go off—in one sense literally.

The sequence begins when the colonel brings lady-of-the-night Apolonia (Anabela Moreira) to the boys. She is to dance and then initiate them into sexual manhood. The impatient ones are to be satisfied last, he tells her, an admonition that one assumes is linked to another moment of sudden violence. In any case, the dance portion of Apolonia’s duties goes well enough. The boys are ordered to sit and enjoy. Thereafter Ze is elected to receive the lady’s first fruits. But his youth, Apolonia’s allure, the colonel’s brashness, and the promise of sex hanging in the air proves combustible. Sated by yet another violent purge, the narrative (and its creator) remember the film’s explicit politics. To bring us back to the political point, Conceição does something clever: he combines realism with the supernatural. It is a bit of a deus ex machina move, but on a metaphoric level it works.

This is Conceição’s second film and it’s clear that he is a superbly confident director. What seems shaky is his film’s cohesiveness, which in uncertain hands would lead to a mediocre production. Instead, despite the limitations of the screenplay, Tommy Guns is a decent way to pass two hours and maybe even think about colonialism, for viewers so inclined. Viewers who do not know much about colonial history might not quite grasp the bigger political issues at play—but they may not need to, because in the film’s dying moments, there is a twist that almost renders the real history of Angola merely incidental to the narrative. It’s not exactly a spoiler to say that, at that point, it might be more important to know the plot of a particular M. Night Shyamalan film from two decades ago.