'Black'

A groovy 70s-style adaptation of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra (you know, the theme music from 2001: A Space Odyssey) sets a funky tone for the opening of Black, which moves briskly and efficiently from a slickly-shot "armored car robbery gone bad" in Paris to a modern update of Shaft in Africa to a lunatic, witchy, bastard offspring of Cat People and Ssssss. It's gloriously lunatic.

All credit to screenwriters Lucio Mad and Gábor Rassov for conjuring up such a fantastic tale, and to director/co-scenarist Pierre Laffargue for framing the action in such a realistic manner. If those names sound suspiciously French to you, yes, people, this is another crazy French genre flick; think of it as the Gallic cousin of The Bourne Identity if Jason Bourne was an ambitious, African-born Parisian criminal set loose on the streets of Dakar, Senegal.

The title character, played by rap artist MC Jean Gab'1 (District B13), survives a botched heist and then gets a phone call from his cousin in Dakar. It seems that a tiny bag filled with big diamonds has been placed in a local bank's safe deposit box for safekeeping, and cousin has the key to the box. All they have to do is blow through inadequate security and pay off a few underpaid guards, and the diamonds will be theirs. Black's eyes light up, and before you can count to three, he's on a plane to Dakar with three of his buddies.

Black was born in Senegal but moved away as a child and has never returned. He views his homecoming through opportunistic, criminal eyes, disgusted by the poverty and apparent simplicity of the people, and all too ready to take advantage of his cousin's tip. His arrival is the tipping point in a series of ever-escalating, mad adventures.



As Black and his crew soon discover, Dakar has just as many nefarious criminals as any other major city; it's just that the cons are different. They may be worldly wise to the ways of Paris, but they're absolutely lost in Senegal. When Black's cohorts mysteriously disappear on the morning of the planned robbery, he boldly improvises a new plan with his cousin.

What Black doesn't know is that the extremely valuable diamonds have attracted other interest. Degrand (François Levantal) lives extravagantly on an island off the coast, and he has problems of his own. An arms shipment he arranged for crazed Russian mercenary Viktor Ouliakov (Anton Yakovlev) has turned up defective, and Viktor demands immediate compensation. Degrand tries to put pressure on Komassi, a executive at the bank where the diamonds are being kept, but Komassi has just been ousted by the bank's board because of his underhanded, unprofitable dealings. He tells Degrand about the diamonds, Viktor finds out, and the Russian mercenaries try to steal the diamonds at the exact same moment as the desperate Parisian import Black arrives on the scene.

If the movie sounds plot-heavy, it's not. All the narrative details fly by, subservient to the pounding pace of the action, and director Laffargue keeps things from flying completely off the rails, even as a smoking hot undercover Interpol agent (Carole Karemera), a degenerative skin condition, witchcraft, and a team of machete-wielding wrestlers are calmly thrown into the mix. Black is a smart, wily, and breakneck operative, but so are the people he's dealing with. He's not discouraged by anything, but his eyes are opened to the idea that his countrymen are maybe not so dumb after all.

In his introduction to the world premiere screening on Saturday night, Alamo Drafthouse Founder and programmer Tim League described Black as being in the spirit of 70s blaxpoitation films. You can definitely see those influences, intentional or not, in the great "wah wah" funky soundtrack, the occasional, wildly exaggerated reaction shots, the rogue's gallery of tough guys and dangerous girls, the gleeful, nearly continuous action, and the outlandishly moody, yet completely effective, wind-up.

Black percolates like that first, strong cup of coffee in the morning -- with no bitter aftertaste. It screens at SXSW again at midnight on Wednesday, March 18, and will open in France in July, in Canda in August, and, if we're lucky, in the US: the produer said a distribution deal may be brewing.

You can check out the trailer at the official site.