NYFF: "Night of Kings"

Our coverage of the New York Film Festival -- you can buy virtual tickets to most of these films -- continues.

by Nathaniel R

The prison movie is its own specific subgenre, holding close to its own tropes, structural familiarity, and character types. Though we've never been imprisoned, we imagined these are culled from reality as much as imagined from collective nightmare. As a general rule, we long for escape from well worn genres, but in some cases it's useful shorthand. Such it is with Philippe LaCôte's Night of Kings, the buzzy Ivory Coast Oscar submission which we suspect might have been too confusing to resonate for Western audiences, were if not for these familiar, even universal, elements...

For Night of Kings, to its credit, is very specifically African. It pays tribute to the tradition of the griot (travelling African storytellers) and takes place in Abidjan (where the director grew up). The story, which unrolls over a single night, is set in the real prison "La Maca," hellishly infamous in its region, but heretofore unknown to us.

A new inmate (Bakary Koné in an impressive onscreen debut), is handpicked seemingly at random, by La Maca's resident inmate kingpin Black Beard (Steve Tientcheu, Les Misérables). The  young thief is renamed "Roman" and is told that he'll be the prison's new official storyteller in a deadly ritual that night. The arrhythmic storytelling ritual, which mysteriously stops and starts at frequent random intervals -- as if the entire prison populace shares the same sense of dramaturgy or impatience -- can be gripping but it's also baffling.

Though the prison populace are frequently shown in rapt attention, the thief is actually not a gifted storyteller, rewinding or sidebar-ing often and definitely after each break by informing us that he's entirely forgotten some important detail. His redirections aren't meticulously-crafted Tarantino-style non-linear plotting, but born entirely from his survival insintct. La Maca's strangest inmate (Denis Lavant, Holy Motors) has warned him that he's in a bit of a Scherezade like situation; he'll be killed when his story ends unless he can keep the audience engaged until morning. 

The story Roman chooses to tell has a true-ish base. He recounts the rise of an infamous crime boss named "Zama", who he purports to have known as a kid. His 'biopic' within the movie is heavily fictionalized and Roman keeps adding supernatural embellishments. Given the jumbled way he tells a story and the framing story about this night in the prison, it's very easy to lose your place and any nuances and meaning of the interpersonal and political dynamics in the chaotic crowded scenes with dozens upon dozens of bodies jammed into every frame.

The director's keen visual eye does a fine job of navigating said chaos, though, Lacôte finds numerous ways to "see" the story, which adds to playful layering. One brief memorable bit is the prisoners struggling and craning to see the moon -- if its blood red the ritual begins -- through the prison's obstructed views even though we are privvy to a much clearer view of the hallucinatory color of the sky. Another particularly brilliant touch is having the prison management viewing the story through a peephole. We're with the officials early on as they set up the "movie" for us, bringing the new inmate to La Maca and abandoning him to Black Beard's internal rule, but soon, they recede. They become another version of us, if you will, watching this story within a story with both rapt attention and confusion from a safe distance. Their one intervention, then, is fairly damning, making us complicit in the bloodlust that only Black Beard -- the theoretical 'villain' -- has vocally confessed to. B/B+

You can rent Night of Kings, Ivory Coast's Oscar submission, for $15 until September 29th. NEON will release the picture at a later date. We think it has a decent shot at making the finals! 

Comments

[Ken]

This was such a great movie! I loved it.

Thanks for making us aware that we can rent these movies from the NYFF.

[Someone]

Piece of crap of a movie, to be honest. :)