WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

The fiction feature Second Coming, written and directed by Debbie Tucker Green, screened in the Festival’s Panorama section last Wednesday 23 September. Our blogger, Aurora Herrera, attended the screening, where the director was present.

Second Coming has a sensitive, nuanced style of filmmaking. It also expresses the vocabulary of the domestic life of a family more through what is not said than what is.

The story follows Jackie, her husband Mark, and their eleven-year-old son, JJ, who live in south London. To JJ, the routine life of the household provides a safe space for him to enjoy being a kid with no responsibilities. However, Jackie seems off kilter from the very beginning. She is pregnant and she seems to have no idea how it happened. As the story gradually reveals, she and Mark have not been intimate in quite some time.

As each day passes, Jackie recedes further into herself. Tucker Green creates a sense of claustrophobia with tight camera angles. This stifling feeling pervades the household and more and more cracks appear along the fault lines of the family.

The film remains ambiguous as to Jackie’s true state of mind. She does not acknowledge any extra-marital relations but her unwillingness to tell her husband does raise the level of suspicion. Eventually it is revealed that the couple has suffered four previous miscarriages. The audience comes to understand Jackie’s fears about the pregnancy and also about telling her husband.

Scenes of domestic life are juxtaposed with seemingly mystical events. Jackie begins to have what she calls “visions” that begin with a light rain drip-dripping in her bathroom. Tucker Green once again keeps the camera tight, not panning to the roof for the audience to investigate whether the cause might an unfortunate plumbing issue. As her pregnancy progresses, Jackie begins to suffer from nosebleeds and that light drip-dripping rain becomes a windy tempest. Suffice it to say Mark and JJ do not wake up to a flooded house.

The audience is left to question whether these phenomena are really symptoms of an immaculate conception, omens of the second coming or if Jackie is suffering from any cognitive dysfunction caused by a tumor or some other malady. Truly, the success of this film is in Tucker Green keeping allegory at arms length.

“With the nosebleeds and the rain, I told the special effects guys that I wanted to bend naturalism,” Tucker Green said during the Q&A session. “It was just messing with reality instead of taking her out completely from that place. It’s not real, the house isn’t flooding, but we don’t know if it’s in her head and if she is seeing things.”

Despite the colourful interjection of Jackie’s Jamaican family and the spice of their patois, all of the main characters fall into a state of despair, a feeling which Tucker Green conjures with ellipses in conversation, the blandness of not only their domestic space but also of their interpersonal relationships. The muteness of fear defines the experience of the film. Surfeits in conversation would have broken the delicate silence of sadness that grips the audience.

Jackie eventually has the baby, a girl, and we see the family together one year later celebrating her first birthday. In the last moments of the film, something happens that could only be described as a miracle.

When one audience member asked Tucker Green about the psychology of the main female character and what really happened, the director maintained that she prefers to keep the story ambiguous and let the audience work through it for themselves.

“I’ll leave it as ambiguous,” she said. “I’ve got my view but everyone has their view. Nadine [Marshall, who played Jackie] and I know the truth because she can’t play a character and [not] know what was going on but I thought it was definitive.”

Apart from Marshall, the cast features Kai Francis-Lewis (JJ) and Idris Elba (Mark). I felt that the cast was stellar in their respective roles. Tucker Green commented on the casting process.

“We sent Idris the script and he said he liked it but his schedule is nuts,” she said. “The film was already green-lit without him but it worked out. I also sat down with Nadine to talk to her about it. Nadine is a great actress and this film is so much behind the eyes. As for Kai, he was the first child who came through the door but we didn’t cast him [then]. We saw loads [of other boys] and then we decided he was it.”

One of the audience members commented on the cinematography.

“I liked the car scene with the use of the mirrors,” she said. “It was beautiful.”

“The car was interesting,” said Green. “We did quite a few scenes in cars so we did a lot of hunting around for interesting angles.”

The director was also asked about her experience working with the birds that appear in the film.

“Birds and babies you can’t direct but the birds were alright,” she said. “We had to have birds that weren’t so small that the kids would hurt them and birds that weren’t so big they would hurt the kids. The kids had to rehearse with the birds a few weeks ahead. So the blackbird, we had two, the kids called one “evil bird” because it kept pecking them. You can’t see it but they are cuffed and on very long lines so they won’t fly away. It’s fairly straightforward and you have to be very quiet. In postproduction, you have to paint out the pieces of brass that might have shown.”

You can see Second Coming again on Monday 28 September, 9.00pm, MovieTowne POS.

The mid-length documentary Bottom in de Road, directed by Oyetayo Ojoade and Sharon Syriac, had its world premiere on Tuesday at the ttff/15. Our blogger, Aurora Herrera, attended the screening.

Thought provoking, crass, insightful, and controversial.

Those are all words used to describe Bottom in de Road, a film by Oyetayo Ojoade and his wife Sharon Syriac. The work explores “bottom power”, offering analysis of the female bottom as seen through the gaze of the Caribbean man. The role of the bottom in expressing freedom and as a source of religious controversy are also considered.

The world premiere of this documentary elicited a varying scope of reactions from the viewers.

“Overall it was a bit crass but I didn’t expect so much balance,” one male audience member said. “I expected to be more offended because this society is already a patriarchal, sexist society and you see so much perspective about a woman’s behind everywhere. The Black Venus [Sarah Baartman], and the history that came from her perspective I thought gave more balance. It made the film smarter.”

“It was excellent, I liked how they mixed the humour and it was at the same time serious,” one female audience member said. “Even with the humour there were elements of the serious and a lot of the intellectuals brought out their serious opinion.”

When asked if she found the film offensive in any way, she said that you have to move beyond being offended.

“It’s Bottom in the Road, it has to be misogynistic,” she said. “The director said that it is from the male perspective. That is our culture.”

Ojoade explained his inspiration for the film to the audience saying, “I have got a cross-cultural background; a Trinidadian mother and a Nigerian father. I spent half my life in Nigeria where you see the woman dressed a certain way. They dress in lose clothing that covers their backside. So occasionally you will see the young university student wearing tight fitting jeans and depending on where she goes, she will get harassed. But moving to Trinidad in my adult life, I saw women and young women and girls dressing in revealing clothes exposing the bottom. It was a culture shock for me and that is why I had to do this.”

Oyetayo Ojoade has a BA in Film from the University of the West Indies and is the director of the short documentary films Who Let the Dogs Out? (ttff/08), Shouters and the Control Freak Empire (ttff/10), and co-director of The Madonna Murti (ttff/11), as well as the short fiction film Suck Meh Soucouyant, Suck Meh (ttff/09).

His wife, Sharon Syriac, who co-directed the film, is a lecturer in Communications at the University of Trinidad and Tobago and a Postgraduate student of Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies. She is also the co-director of The Madonna Murti.

“Because of the sensitivity of the topic and the controversy that it would generate, yes it was a deliberate technique in order to draw the audience in to plug in some very serious issues which we feel should be considered,” Syriac said.

Along with the man on the street, the film featured interviews with Iwer George, Denyse Plummer, Destra Garcia, gender studies expert Gabrielle Hosein, scholar at the University of the West Indies Gordon Rohlehr, and sexologist Dr Giriraj Ramnanan.

One audience member in particular did not appreciate the lengthy discussion and categorisation of female bottoms by a regular man on the street, who was referred to as “the prose version of Iwer George”, by another audience member.

“It was like categorising animals almost,” the said about the cataloguing of female glutei maximi.

The film makes a very weak attempt at balancing the examination of the female derriere with that of male behinds, allotting about six per cent of screen time to the topic.

One audience member commented, “The bit about men not having significant behinds, I wanted to ask, are we in the dark ages? That was unnecessary.”

Another audience member said,” I think this film is fantastic and should go international!”

I think it would be rather interesting to ask if the women featured were these men’s daughters, sisters, girlfriends or wives, if they would still feel this much gusto for the film.

The film is definitely thought-provoking. There are many healthy discourses that can come out of it. For example, there is the question of whether the showing off of the bottom is an act of true freedom and independence or rather the fulfilling of a biological act; where the female attempts to be desirous to the male for him to choose to mate with her, which when stripped down, is basically submission to the male choice and need.

Moreover, this dialogue can also be looked at in the paradigm of colonisation and its social and psychological impact.

As gender studies expert Gabrielle Hosein says in the film, “We have to understand the the obsession, the praise and the adoration of the female bottom in Caribbean culture is not only because female bodies in and of themselves—regardless of their shape and size—are beautiful, but it is because of a long colonial emphasis on the bottoms of African women.”

The film also engenders questions such as: Are women even aware of these concepts as they don their revealing costumes? Do they consider the theories and archetypes associated with a postcolonial society and still make that decision consciously as a means of expressing their freedom, or are they merely following trends and have no idea what their displays truly mean to themselves and others?

One female audience member asked if men realise whether there is a fine line between dressing up for Carnival and looking cute and sexy as opposed to being vulgar. Of course vulgarity is a matter of perspective but the question can also be added to the discourse.

Syriac said, “It took us three years to make this film. He [Ojoade] did all the filming and he followed all of those female bottoms. A lot of the times on the street when he followed women, they didn’t know that their bottoms were being taped, so that it one reason why we didn’t have the women respond because he had to do it undercover. I was not there.”

While I understand that social media has normalised the presence of cameras at every fete, club night and lime, most times, the photographer will ask if a photo or video can be taken. This seems like common courtesy even if filming on the streets. It seemed sort of creepy for Ojoade to do all of this in secret, from the back.

Also, there was a scene with Saucy Pow which was backed by the song Boom Bye Bye, a song by Buju Banton whish is widely regarded as anti-gay. I felt that it was quite offensive.

You can see Bottom in the Road on the following dates:

Sat 26 Sept, 3.00pm, MovieTowne Tobago
Sat 26 Sept, 5.00pm, UWI Q&A
Tue 29 Sept, 5.30pm, MovieTowne Tobago
Sun 27 Sept, 11.00am, MovieTowne POS Q&A