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Baadasssss!
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Cinema
history boasts some intriguing parent/child collaborations. Elia Kazan tapped his gifted son Nicholas to write the anti-Vietnam War film The Visitors (1972). Elaine May cast her
daughter Jeannie Berlin in an indelibly grotesque role in The Heartbreak Kid (1972). But no
one has gone quite so far as Mario Van Peebles in Baadasssss!.
The
film is a tribute to Mario’s father, filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles (those with
eagle eyes would have spotted them together on the red carpet at the 2005
Academy Awards). Melvin made a classic of radical cinema, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, in 1971. His son’s film
recreates the hilariously fraught conditions of Sweetback’s making. When shown at
the Melbourne Film Festival in 2004, it bore the funkier title of Gettin’ the Man’s Foot Outta Your Baadasssss!.
Sweetback is
primarily celebrated today as a forerunner to the cycle of wildly successful blaxploitation movies including Shaft (1971) and Foxy Brown (1974) – raw, invigorating genre films with a Black Pride message. But Melvin
Van Peebles’ political line was harder, and his filmmaking style had more in
common with experimental cinema of the 1960s than Hollywood B-level entertainment.
All the way up to Bellyful (2000) and
beyond, his films have remained deliberately disconcerting collages of drama,
satire and “visionary cinema” techniques.
Mario
Van Peebles is a more controlled, mainstream filmmaker than his wild Dad. (His
best film, Panther [1995] co-written
by Melvin, is also his most daring.) At moments his depiction of how Melvin
would keep shooting no matter what catastrophe was unfolding, and with any
means to hand, recalls the portrait of a deranged amateur in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994). And perhaps there is a little too much starstruck emphasis on the celebrities who crossed Melvin’s path, like Bill Cosby (played
by T. K. Carter) and the band Earth, Wind & Fire.
Despite
all the affectionate recounting of problems on the set and the feel-good
celebration of the black community pulling together to make Sweetback a success, there is a
curious father/son struggle at the heart of Baadassss!. Mario takes the part of his father, and also directs a
representation of himself as a boy. The film details, with some intensity, the
grief Melvin caused his partner, Sandra (Nia Long), and
the supposed trauma through which Dad put his son by including him in a (mild)
sex scene for his movie.
Made
for television, Baadasssss! veers from some weakly naturalistic
scenes – like the documentary about Terry Gilliam, Lost in La Mancha (2002), it tends
to exaggerate the banal, logistical difficulties of filmmaking into major
melodrama – to strenuous attempts to jazz up proceedings with rapid montages
and fantasy inserts.
But
there is no doubting the instructive fun of this glimpse into independent
filmmaking of the early 1970s. And don’t check out until you see the silent,
stony visage of Van Peebles Snr in the final frames.
MORE Van Peebles jnr.: Posse © Adrian Martin March 2005 |
