Seen at Alice in the City 2024. Opening film.
We admit it, we haven't read The Nickel Boys, the novel by Colson Whitehead on which RaMell's film is based Ross.
Maybe the work will develop in the form of a stream of consciousness like Joyce's Ulysses; otherwise we cannot find other explanations for Ross' directorial choices.
We are in the United States of the 1960s, the era of struggles for the recognition of civil rights for blacks.
Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) is a promising young African American on his way to high school who will accept a ride from the wrong person; a thief.
He will end up at the Nickel Academy, a reformatory, where he will try to survive the hard daily life also helped by his close friendship with Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson).
The film starts right from Elwood's childhood, spent with his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis), twenty minutes almost completely devoid of dialogue composed of very short sequences, sometimes under a minute.
Fragments of life that seem to be thrown at random between shots crooked and seemingly insignificant details; a close-up of the protagonist picking up a coin, him as a child playing with his grandmother under the white blankets, details of the iron or a row of shoes in a corridor.
You soon understand the game; these are essentially subjective shots of the protagonist.
The problem is that 90% of the film is practically shot like this, alternating subjective and semi-subjective shots.
Maybe the intent was to bring to a total identification with the protagonist; the result is that little or nothing is understood.
Things become even more complicated when Jack enters the scene, given that the two points of view will overlap.
Ross not happy every now and then inserts images unrelated to the story; sequences from The Mud Wall (1958) by Stanley Kramer or the Apollo 8 mission; both acting as a counterpoint to the story we are witnessing, by analogy or metaphor.
But it doesn't end here, because the experimental creativity of our intrepid author finds vent in dreamlike sequences or short inserts made from photos, cartoons animated and so on, all while the film proceeds inexorably for more than two interminable hours, always between subjective and semi-subjective.
The chaos reaches its peak when very short flash-forward fragments begin showing the future of one of the two protagonists or towards the end when the usual incomprehensible collage of short fragments illustrate a sort of possible alternative development.
In short, RaMel Ross plays at being an "experimental" director with disastrous results for patience of the spectator.
Let's leave aside the aspect of complaint, given that the abuses perpetrated in the Nickel Academy often remain in the background or off-screen and are dealt with superficially or in a botched manner like everything else.
0>EMILIANO BAGLIO
