BARIGA SUGAR AND WHY MORE FILMS SHOULD BE ABOUT NOTHING
There’s a type of film called a slacker film a film that usually features an unwilling hero who is lazy and quite nonplussed by the scale of the adventure. Richard Linklater’s 1991 film Slacker is, as the name suggests, the first truly deliberate slacker film though it is not necessarily the first. There are slacker characters in films that are not necessarily slacker films, such as Ed in Edgar Wrights Shaun of the Dead (2004). And there are decidedly slacker films such as Clerks (1994) and Pineapple Express (2008). Linklater is regarded to be the leader of the ideology of the genre but his Before Sunset seems to me to be about life rather than reluctance.
The slacker film has got a long tradition at this point and Marisa Meltzer writing for Slate even described it as being in the process of a quarter life crisis (such a concept is perhaps as pseudo modern as the genre itself). I think that the true value of the Slacker genre is the fact that the protagonist’s aimlessness, reluctance and detachment allows for the story to make interesting commentary on everything the protagonist interacts with. In Pineapple Express the protagonist Dale Denton, a humble though dissatisfied civil servant, is stranded between corrupt repressive government and organised crime. The eponymous Shaun from Edgar Wrights’ acclaimed comedy horror is an electronics store clerk who shows a similar detachment from society and himself to the protagonist in High Fidelity (2000) but his perception of his own culture seem to come to life when everyone around him turns into a zombie and he can hardly tell the difference (at first). Shaun is one of the outcasts in Linklater’s Slacker (1991) he is ‘withdrawing in disgust’ from society as the characters in Linklater’s film are. Because the character in these films wants nothing she/he is able to serve as a conduit.
But I believe there is a way of going beyond this, of transferring the commentary of the main character and transferring it to the film’s voice and making the post-modernist peering into what Sartre called the absurdity of the world more direct, intense whilst less clichéd. Having thought this was possible for a long time I finally came across a film that proved it true.
Ifeoma Nkiruka Chukwuogo’s Bariga Sugar (2017) is brilliant film that tells an amazing story in a brilliant and so very African way, it actually reminds me of Zola Maseko’s The Foreigner (1998) which is an amazing for a short film to do. The film is essentially about everything at once and in 21 minutes instead of Garden State’s 109. The film is about an 8 year old little girl called Ese but more than that it is about the way in which she interacts with the community of Bariga Sugar which is a brother where her mother works as a prostitute, during the film she meets a 10 year old boy called Jamil whose mother comes to work at the brothel and who dies towards the end of the film. For comparison we will look at umkhungo (2010) by Mathew Jankes; that film is also a well-known short film about a child in a key stage of development that makes a new friend and learns about death. The difference between the two is how surprisingly traditional Umkhungo is, it is essentially (as good as it is) a three act structured cause and effected hero’s journey it is very simple and there is hardly any truly deep questioning of the surrounding ideologies that informed the film. The topic at hand in Umkhungo is as in most films the development of the character. As brilliant as it is The Foreigner (1998) is very focused on a topic and cannot therefore have the breadth of interrogated topics that films like Bariga Sugar can have. Bariga Sugar is not about Ese; the film has three clear acts punctuated by the arrival and exit of Jamil from Ese’s life but the progression in the film is the depth with which the ideologies surrounding the film are questioned. That is what makes it seem like the film is about everything. For example in the film we see Ese watch on as Jamil is teased after a game of soccer (because his mother is a whore) and later we see Jamil’s mother being told by Ese’s mother to keep Jamil away from Ese for Ese’s safety and finally we see Jamil die hurting Ese and himself in the process but subverting our expectations, it is also interesting to note that Jamil’s death is essentially his own fault because he defies the decree which was made for his safety. Another Example in the film is how the image of Bariga Sugar, the girls working there and Madam Sugar the film deals with society’s image of the sex workers, the way the community is marshalled by Madam Sugar and there is even a suggestion by Ese that the whole country could be run by a woman the way that bariga sugar is run (but better and by Ese herself) a suggestion which Jamil immediately repudiates. At the beginning of the film Ese is confused and misinformed about the way in which her world works and we interact with events through her eyes but without her naïveté as she is essentially parentalised and realises that the world is not entirely the way that she was presented it, and though her youthful ignorance gives the audience an extra layer of questioning the interrogations of the ideas and Bariga Sugar (and by extension the world) is presented as a function of the film and is communicated through the structure and voice of the film itself.
Ese is not trying to overcome any weakness or specific past trauma, she does not go anywhere or gain any very clear answers about how her world works, she just happens to make a friend. Bariga Sugar rocked me in a way that films rarely do, it is the most brilliant short film I have seen so far in 2017. The ability that a film has to question the world and its structures when it has no clear topic is perhaps unparalleled, especially when the voice of the slacker is absorbed into the narration of the film. Films like Upstream Colour (2013) which are completely abstract (I hadn't sen Dog Star Man (1961) yet at the time of writing) are not eligible because they are not a generalised critique of our assumptions of life in the same way. Good examples of films with an effect that is vaguely similar to this are Inside Llewin Davis (2014), Garden State (2004), Zerkalo (1975), 45 Years (2015) but none of these are actually as pronounced or effective as Chukwuogo’s film. I think all films should be like Bariga Sugar, about nothing.
***Oh and you can't watch Bariga Sugar on YouTube/Vimeo any longer as it has been made private since the time of writing presumably because the producers have sold it. Honourable mention is made to Bruna Surfistinha (2011) only because it was the only other film about underage prostitution that was this good.
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