What were you doing when you were 17? A lot, probably: it’s a busy time, after all. But between school, university applications and partying, chances are that making a feature film wasn’t high on your to-do list. Had it been, even greater chances are that it wouldn’t have been much cop.
New Orleans-born Phillip Youmans, on the other hand, is the obstinate exception. Now 19 and in his first year at New York University, he has a whole film under his belt, made in his final year of high school and already amply travelled and rewarded on the festival circuit. It slipped quietly on to Netflix earlier this month, with little fanfare, as if fully formed films by teenagers come along all the time and merit no special fanfare. It deserves a big screen, but at least it’s here: you’d do well to stop and take a look.
One’s first impulse is to say that Youmans’s film, Burning Cane, is pretty extraordinary for one so young, though that’s needlessly condescending: it’s pretty extraordinary, full stop. As a study of economic and emotional desolation in the most abandoned corners of African American society, it has gravity and lived-in texture beyond the reach of many slicker, glibber social dramas from older film-makers that pour out of Sundance every year. (Burning Cane instead emerged from the lower-profile Tribeca fest, where it ruled the jury prizes.) Understandable comparisons have been made to the early, tough-minded humanism of Charles Burnett: you’d be forgiven for assuming Youmans had watched Killer of Sheep a few times, though he’s admitted he wasn’t familiar with Burnett’s work until it was brought up in relation to his own film.
Youmans does cite Barry Jenkins as an influence, however. That makes sense too, though there’s little of Moonlight’s velvety visual poetry in Burning Cane’s scratched, hard-edged vision of impoverished rural Louisiana: any beauty here is very hard-won, though it does come. First, however, Youmans wants us to feel a measure of his characters’ suffering. His protagonist Helen (a superbly careworn Karen Kaia Livers) is a God-fearing Aids widow whose intense faith is hardly rewarded in kind by either the universe or the church itself. Her adult son is a freefalling alcoholic, while her pastor (the redoubtable Wendell Pierce, currently wowing the West End in Death of a Salesman), is another drunk, unable to muster up conviction in his own sermons, much less comfort to others.
Youmans is observant and matter-of-fact about the personal, political and environmental degrees of neglect that account for this catalogue of poverty and abuse, but Burning Cane isn’t hollow, scolding misery porn. Its anger is countered by curious, compassionate interest in people and how they live, or simply skirt dying. The list of major films made by teenage directors is a short one, but usually characterised by adolescent frustration and introspection: look at Xavier Dolan’s mesmerising but unapologetically self-oriented debut I Killed My Mother (available on iTunes) or Chantal Akerman’s nascent, brilliant feminist short Saute ma ville (on YouTube) for examples. Burning Cane is different: Youmans has arrived with a fully adult, outward perspective. If he’s this good now, his post-university oeuvre will be something to behold.
New to streaming and DVD this week
Pavarotti
(Universal, 12)
Ron Howard’s documentaries aren’t very different from his narrative films: slickly and divertingly assembled, and not challenging for a minute. Fans of the late tenor will thrill to this music-rich study, but it’s palpably afraid to go too deep on him.
The Accused
(Signature, E)
Already remade in France, and skipping cinemas to arrive on VOD here, this engrossing Argentinian courtroom thriller infuses a potentially lurid did-she-or-didn’t-she story – around a teen’s alleged murder of her best friend – with pleasing psychological ambiguity.
Secret Ceremony
(Powerhouse, 15)
Joseph Losey’s 1960s output could be enthrallingly bananas, and never more so than this deranged, oft-derided Elizabeth Taylor-Mia Farrow psychodrama, finally out on Blu-ray – a high-camp object bedecked in broken mirror shards.
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