Caribbean Beat — January/February 2018 (#149)

SCREENSHOTS
Woodpeckers
Directed by José María Cabral, 2017, 106 minutes
Love literally knows no bounds in Woodpeckers, an inventive,
at times enthralling prison drama from the Dominican
Republic’s José María Cabral. A precocious filmmaker
(he made his first feature at
twenty), Cabral — still shy of
thirty — achieved notice in
2012 with Check Mate, a slick,
formulaic thriller. Woodpeckers
— which has been submitted to
the upcoming Academy Awards
for best foreign-language film
— sees him grappling with
more interesting material, and
for the most part wringing
from it successful results.
Inspired by true events, Woodpeckers was shot on location
in adjacent men’s and women’s prisons, a catastrophe
waiting to happen if ever there was one. Julian (Jean
Jean, wiry and compellingly intense) is sent to the men’s
penitentiary after being convicted of a robbery charge.
Here he encounters an astonishing phenomenon: men
communicating with women in the yard across the way
through a form of sign language known as pecker talk,
the men’s hands when grasping the prison bars mimicking
woodpeckers grasping a tree branch.
Deputised by Manaury (Ramón Candelario), a
convicted murderer temporarily in solitary confinement,
Jean Jean quickly learns this unique language of love in
order to trade messages with Manaury’s girlfriend Yanelly
(a fiery Judith Rodríguez, with
a hairstyle to match). It isn’t
long before Jean Jean and
Yanelly are attracted to one
another, and the film must
contrive ways of bringing the
couple into physical contact
with each other. It also isn’t
long before Manaury begins
to suspect something’s amiss,
and the lovers’ idyll is in
jeopardy.
Woodpeckers has a novel core idea, the director dramatising
it with the panache it deserves. The attendant
plotting might still be rather formulaic, but Cabral is able
to create a tragic denouement of almost Shakespearean
proportions. And the crafty final shot will make you want
to watch the film again.
For more information, visit facebook.com/
carpinterosmovie
Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
Directed by Sophie Fiennes, 2017, 115 minutes
Predictable and conventional
are not words
associated with Grace
Jones. Shot over nearly
a decade by British
documentarian Sophie
Fiennes, Bloodlight and
Bami is an engrossing
portrait of the provocative Jamaican disco icon that
is appropriately neither of those things. Not for the
uninitiated, the film forgoes the usual trappings of
the biographical profile (there isn’t a single archival
photograph or bit of file footage), instead presenting
an intimate, vérité-style look at the current life of the
virtually ageless Jones, in locations ranging from Paris to
Jamaica to New York.
The unvarnished observational sequences are punctuated
by polished concert performances, Jones giving
redoubtable renditions of dance-floor anthems like
“Slave to the Rhythm” and “Pull Up to the Bumper”. Yet
it’s in the often-unguarded moments when Jones is out
of the spotlight that the film attains its power, becoming
a witness to her tenacity, vulnerability, and simple,
affecting humanness.
For more information, visit westendfilms.com
The West Indies Gang
Directed by Jean-Claude Barny, 2016, 90 minutes
Based on actual events,
The West Indies Gang
recounts the deeds of
a group of men from
the French Antilles —
victims of poverty and
racism — who robbed a
string of post offices in
Paris in the 1970s. The protagonist, Jimmy (a sympathetic
Djedje Apali), is a single father to a young daughter.
When Jimmy returns to mainland France after obtaining
weapons from a separatist militia in Martinique, the
gang prepares for its final and most ambitious heist, a
bank job.
Sadly, what could have been a bracingly political crime
thriller flounders amid unreconstructed Blaxploitation
tropes (a scene where a woman is savagely beaten is
particularly disturbing) and a literal lack of firepower.
The film also lacks the courage of its anti-colonial convictions,
when at the end an incarcerated Jimmy puzzlingly
declares that “Our struggle isn’t racial, it’s societal.”
For more information, visit facebook.com/
Legangdesantillais
Reviews by Jonathan Ali
40 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM