BLACK WOMEN AS SUPERHEROES
The origins of modern superheroes can be found in classical myth and legend. That’s easy to forget now that every comic-book movie arrives with an endless, borderline self-perpetuating chorus of excitement and hype.
“Fast Color,” the lowbudget superhero film from director Julia Hart, strips away many of the genre’s bells and whistles. By whittling its apocalyptic premise down to the scale of a modest drama, the film explores superheroes at their most mythical, finding genuine resonance along the way.
At first, the film unfolds like a thriller. Gugu MbathaRaw plays Ruth, a young woman on the run. Her predicament is not explained, but her desperation is real: She is prone to violent seizures that shake the walls surrounding her (literally), and every friendly face may be a government scientist who wants to perform invasive tests.
She finally makes her way to an isolated home where her mother, Bo (Lorraine Toussaint), lives with Ruth’s estranged daughter, Lila (Saniyya Sidney). Their reunion is tense — Ruth is a recovering drug addict — but still they are able to bond over the supernatural abilities they share.
Atmosphere is key to the film’s success. Hart and her co-screenwriter Jordan Horowitz imagine a barren landscape where water is a scarce resource. They do not see a breakdown of society and instead prefer a more incremental approach: This is a future where everything is simply worse than what we’re used to now. This austere landscape is also a shrewd way to explain the economical production values.
Race and gender are important undercurrents to the film. Ruth and Bo, both black women, want to teach Lila what it takes to live in a country that’s indifferent or even hostile to that identity. All of Ruth’s pursuers are white men, and they do not understand her potential, background or spirituality. Their attempt to “tame” Ruth is where the film finds an allegorical dimension.
“Fast Color” is ultimately about black women whose power is misunderstood and how they sacrifice their individuality for the greater good.
Although the ending is sublime, “Fast Color” can drag a little. The lengthy
middle section nearly falls into the trappings of a typical indie drama. Superpowers add some intrigue — Bo and Lila can deconstruct and reassemble objects with their mind — but this section is talky to a fault.
Pacing notwithstanding, “Fast Color” succeeds on the strength of its ideas. Superhero movies do not need huge budgets or A-list actors to connect with audiences. They need plausible characters, made so by their reactions to extraordinary situations. This film can be frustrating — but then, we have been desensitized by talking raccoons and superhuman strength.
LORRAINE TOUSSAINT, FROM LEFT, SANIYYA SIDNEY AND GUGU MBATHA-RAW STAR IN “FAST COLOR.”
“Peterloo” is a paradox. Historical and contemporary, epic and intimate, political and personal, it is both unlike anything writer-director Mike Leigh has done before and the grand culmination of his career.
Edging into David Lean territory in terms of its ambition and its twohour-and-33-minute running time, “Peterloo” is equal parts rewarding and demanding, and the gradual way it unfolds allows its cumulative heartbreaking power to take us by surprise.
As his seven Oscar nominations (five for writing, two for directing) for films like “Secrets and Lies” and “Vera Drake” attest, the uncompromising Leigh is the odds-on candidate for top British filmmaker of his generation.
But though Leigh’s reputation comes from his unique, organic way of working with actors, a system resulting in works that redefined the possibilities for realistic emotion on screen, even the most personal of his narratives has had a political subtext.
And though “Peterloo,” based as it is on an infamous bloody event in British history, may be his most overtly political film, it wouldn’t have the wrenching effect it does if Leigh had not paid close attention to the personal and had not used his particular gifts to create historical characters who come to unmistakable life under his touch.
Though its 200th anniversary is coming up in a few months, what is known to history as the Peterloo Massacre is almost unknown in this country — and apparently not as much as it might be in Britain.
In effect a 19th-century police riot in a place called St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, it saw a huge throng of 60,000 to 100,000 peaceful demonstrators attacked by a volunteer mounted militia as well as regular troops, all with sabers drawn.
The result — an estimated 18 killed and more than 600 wounded — has been called the worst violence ever to occur at a political meeting in Britain.
Leigh’s films have been historical before, but they’ve mostly involved venturesome artistic types like Gilbert and Sullivan (“Topsy-Turvy”) and the painter J.M.W. Turner (“Mr. Turner”).
And none has started with anything as dramatic as a moment from the Battle of Waterloo, an epochal event of the type you would’ve sworn the intimacy-focused Leigh would never get anywhere near.
Given that its focus is on showing all sides of a moment in history, “Peterloo” doesn’t follow a single protagonist or use actors we’ve seen a lot of before.
Leigh instead introduces us to members of intersecting groups,
allowing us to eavesdrop on real and vivid moments.
In the fog of war at Waterloo, we meet the British bugler Joseph (David Moorst), a dazed and confused victim of PTSD before it had a name.
Joseph painstakingly makes his way on foot to his home in Manchester in the north of England, where most of his family works at the cotton mills that are changing the face of society in a way that Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels would detail a few years later.
Life in early-19th-century Britain is weighted heavily in favor of the haves, but, with the class violence of the French Revolution a vivid and recent memory, the establishment is worried enough to put Waterloo veteran Gen. Sir John Byng (Alastair Mackenzie) in charge of keeping things in the north under control.
By any reasonable standard, Britain’s poor, especially in the north, had a lot to complain about, including — as we see examples of — an arbitrary judicial system that had people deported to Australia or even executed for minor offenses against property.
Though there were radicals in the north, including the pumped-up Samuel Bamford (Neil Bell), one of the points “Peterloo” makes is that class and other distinctions existed between radicals and incrementalists like Henry “Orator” Hunt (Rory Kinnear), a landowner who is not impressed by the lower classes.
While the protesters’ “one man, one vote” demands sound quite modest, one of the implied points of “Peterloo” is just how difficult the fight was to achieve a right that large chunks of the population don’t take advantage of today.
The huge crowds who show up in their proverbial Sunday best are terribly moving in their earnest, soon to be shattered hopefulness. They deserve so much better than they got, and we watch in shock as events unfold. Difficult to experience though its finale may be, “Peterloo” very much gives off the sense that watching is essential. This fight for democracy is our story, too, and the end has yet to be written.
MARCHERS RALLY FOR REFORM AND VOTING RIGHTS IN “PETERLOO.”