Night of the Kings (2020, Philippe Lacôte) (Patreon)

54/100

Rooted in reality to at least some degree, it seems—MACA is a real prison that's genuinely located in the middle of a forest; Lacôte's mother apparently did time there—but I kept thinking of the John Wick franchise's Continental Hotel, with its insular codes and rituals. There's a mythopoetic quality in evidence here well before Roman's story makes it explicit; Blackbeard's method of suicide, for example, is functionally impossible (unless he chains himself to something after leaving the frame, or is weighted in a way that we can't see), but feels exactly right for the movie's "Il était une fois" vibe. So I was caught well off guard when the tale of Zama King takes a sudden sharp turn into recent Ivory Coast history, with which I'm at best glancingly familiar. (Knew of the civil war but had to look up Gbagbo; I paid embarrassingly little attention to international news back then.) Even adjusting for my ignorance, the combination feels misguided for a Scheherazade riff—ideal for impressing the critics at Cannes or Venice, less so for enthralling a bunch of murderous inmates. And the climactic spasm of violence plays like most such spasms do: as a lazy means of quickly wrapping things up. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed the telling of the story, if not the story itself. It's been a while since I've seen a griot-centric African film, and I'd forgotten about the delightful (and especially so in this context) audience-participation aspect; Roman comparing someone to a scorpion, for example, inspires several men to spontaneously fashion one from their own bodies, swaying to and fro like a thrashing stinger. Hard to buy that they could coordinate such movements impromptu, but, again, strict realism clearly isn't Lacôte's primary concern. He's even slyly cast Denis Lavant as what might be cinema's first instance (feel free to cite prior examples) of a Magical Caucasian. Long overdue.