HOLLOW CITY (Maria João Ganga, 2004)

An exquisite, ultimately stunning film about a young life uprooted by war, Hollow City—Na cidade vazia is the Portuguese title—is the first feature by Maria João Ganga, who was born in Angola and who studied film in Paris. It comes from Angola and Portugal, and is set in 1991, during the Angolan civil war. N’dala’s family is slaughtered in rural Bié. The 12-year-old boy, along with other children, is airlifted by the Red Cross to Luanda, Angola’s capital city. However, N’dala eludes the nun in charge of the group and goes off on his own, misled by her religious twaddle into believing that his parents still exist “in the sky” back in Bié. Like E.T., little N’dala wants to go home.

Ganga, reputedly the first Angolan woman filmmaker, deservedly won for Hollow City the Special Jury Prize at the 2004 Paris Film Festival.

Let me say at the outset that Ganga’s script, based on a novel by Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos, is not among the film’s assets. The occasional shifts away from N’dala, who is beautifully portrayed by Roldan Pinto João (perhaps the filmmaker’s nephew or younger brother), in order to follow the nun’s dogged (and unlikely) search to recover the boy, are irritating, and the numerous attempts to force a parallel between N’dala and a national hero being played in a school play by a slightly older boy, Zé, who befriends the homeless orphan, fail to convince. These are distractions, as is the academic irony that the script pursues, to wit, that Luanda proves to be as unsafe for N’dala as was Bié.

Rather, the film’s genuine worth lies in two things. One is its visual design and procedure, its series of highly defined shots rather than narrative scenes—this, correlative to N’dala’s profound impressions and lightning-quick perceptions. The other is the richness of the boy’s solitary wanderings as they intersect with a number of characters who befriend him, including Antonio, a poor, protective, elderly fisherman who refreshes his recollection of home. Another, younger man, Zé’s relation, both kindly helps N’dala, especially in perfecting the craft of his ingenious toy cars made from wire and scrap metal, and later exploits him, involving him in a lethal house theft. N’dala’s innocence is both his strength and his vulnerability.

In effect, Hollow City is a road film—like Roberto Rossellini’s tremendous Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950), a road film by foot. This includes an hypnotic portrait of the half-world of night prostitution. (One of Zé’s cousins is a prostitute.) N’dala’s journey introduces him to a wealth of urban experiences that fill him with wonder but nonetheless sharpen his yearning to go home.

Home.

One thing more: the cinematography by Jacques Besse helps make Hollow City. Cinema’s color experiment has, artistically, fallen flat in the main; but Ganga’s film, especially at night, justifies the use of color to a rare and highly expressive degree.

RAY (Taylor Hackford, 2004)

The musical biography is one of the most malnourished American film genres. It has produced woefully inadequate films, among them, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Rhapsody in Blue, Night and Day, The Jolson Story—all these from the 1940s, when the genre peaked. The very worst musical film I have seen belongs to this genre: The Five Heartbeats (Robert Townsend, 1991), “a slop of corn mush,” my review indicates, and “a sudsy saga tracking through the years a harmonizing group of African-American youngsters with a Motown sound and delirious ambitions.” Now the African-American experience has also spawned the second worst musical film I’ve seen: Ray. This meandering, skin-deep biography of Ray Charles Robinson—Ray Charles, that is—was written by James L. White, a black man, and directed by Taylor Hackford, a white man. It is cheap, hackneyed, pseudomystical and silly.

Ray was born in the deep south in 1930. Ray’s mother washed laundry to support her two small sons. Ray’s brother, George, died in early childhood by drowning in a laundry wash basin—an event that forever after haunted Ray, who had witnessed it. At age seven, Ray went blind. In the absence of a father, his tough-loving mama became his interiorized superego. Presumably a sage, she taught her son, “Scratch a liar, find a thief,” and ordered him not to become a “cripple.” In her final appearance to his seeing mind’s eye, she informs him he did become a cripple because of his dependency on drugs—a problem Ray overcame. Although the film peripherally mentions American racial bigotry, Ray basically contextualizes its rich musical material—Ray himself is heard on the soundtrack as the actor playing Ray flaps his lips—psychologically rather than sociopolitically. This is ludicrous. A biography of Ray Charles should not resemble Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980).

Black people are shown exploiting black people, but Hackford unconscionably avoids something like a unifying theme by remaking one or more of these characters white. Hackford, a liberal, is incapable of radical exploration of the social American landscape; he has failed to grasp the depth of trauma of being black in a hateful white nation and the consequences of this trauma, including the fracturing of black community, the turning of blacks against other blacks in pursuit of some sense of power or autonomy in the face of their constantly losing battles vis-à-vis dominant whites. The perfect fool, Hackford believes he is performing a service to African Americans by downplaying their depth of sociopolitical disadvantage in the American landscape.

Nor is Hackford helped in the slightest by his lead actor, the recently Oscared Jamie Foxx, a TV comic whom some have seen as “channeling” the real Ray Charles. Foxx has his exuberant moments, but he skims the surface, projecting nothing more complex than an impersonation of Charles. But one must commiserate with the erstwhile actor on a single score: the script he was handed, in the tradition of Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz, 1942), whitewashes Charles. To be sure, Charles is shown “doing” heroin and whoring behind his wife’s back; but these activities are presented as part of his personal ordeal, and little is shown of his black rage. Charles is neutered, rendered likeably benign. I recall being astounded—approvingly, I might add—when Charles, addressing whites in a refrain to one of his songs, sang in the sixties, “Well, you’re in for a big surprise.” Here, he was an epic African-American artist warning white Americans not to count too heavily on their own smug complacency and on black American passivity. There is none of that Ray in Foxx’s goonish portrait.

Like Johnny Cash, Charles was that: an epic American performer. He wanted the film to be as it turned out, a safe, pointless tune-fest. But it’s a crumbling monument, thin, brittle, opportunistic. It disdains his thrilling legacy and wastes our time. Ray wasn’t an officer and a gentleman.