Brinsley Forde stars as the conflicted Blue in Franco Rosso’s incendiary Babylon
BABYLON (Franco Rosso, 1980)
Expands Friday, March 15
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One of the best, and most important, British films of the last forty years took the long route to reach America, but it’s finally here, and it’s a knockout. In 1973-74, Franco Rosso and Martin Stellman wrote Babylon, a somewhat semiautobiographical story of prejudice and bigotry set around Jamaican sound system culture during the Thatcher era in South London. The BBC rejected it, and after several production companies passed on it as well, it was finally picked up by Mamoun Hassan of the National Film Finance Corporation. The movie was shot in six weeks on location in Deptford and Brixton and received an X rating, despite having limited violence and no sex. It screened at Cannes but was turned down by the New York Film Festival, which considered the subject matter too controversial. The film was restored in 2008, but an old print was shown at BAM in 2012, the only time the film was officially shown in the United States. That is, until now; the scorching tale at last got its American theatrical release March 8 at BAM and has now opened as well at IFC Center, Kew Gardens Cinemas, Nitehawk, and the Magic Johnson Harlem 9. Babylon is a don’t-miss work that is still frighteningly relevant today, even though it was ripped from the headlines of the 1970s.
The Ital Lion crew prepares for a toasting battle in Babylon
Brinsley Forde, a former child actor and founding member and original guitarist for the British reggae group Aswad, stars as Blue, a toaster — a Jamaican dancehall deejay who chants over riddims — whose crew, Ital Lion, is preparing for a bit-time competition against their archrival, Jah Shaka (the real-life legend who plays himself). Blue is a mechanic but would rather spend his time toasting, smoking spliffs, and goofing around with his buddies, including Beefy (Trevor Lair), Dreadhead (Archie Pool), Scientist (Brian Bovell), Errol (David N. Haynes), Lover (Victor Romero Evans), and Ronnie (Karl Howman), the only white man in the group. When a racist Caucasian family living above their hangout starts threatening them, some of the Ital Lion crew want to fight back, but Blue tries to prevent any violence. However, following a harrowing night when he’s chased through the dark streets by white men in a car, Blue packs his bags and reconsiders his future.
Babylon is a blistering film, spectacularly photographed by Chris Menges, who would go on to win Oscars for his cinematography on The Killing Fields and The Mission, and expertly edited by Thomas Schwalm, bringing the rhythm of the crew to the fore. In his first feature film, Rosso, a documentarian who spent his career making works about the underrepresented, captures the energy and the rage, the spirit and the fear experienced by Blue (superbly played by Forde, who was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2015) and his friends as they try to survive amid ever-more-threatening xenophobic danger that is almost begging for revolution and rebellion. It echoes what is happening around the world now, particularly the treatment of refugees and immigrants (legal and illegal) and calls to build a wall to keep out “the other.” Perhaps not surprisingly, cowriter-director Rosso (The Mangrove Nine, Lucha Libre) was the son of an Italian immigrant, cowriter Stellman (Quadrophenia, Defence of the Realm) is the son of a Viennese Jewish immigrant, producer Gavrik Losey (Magical Mystery Tour, Agatha) is the son of blacklisted American director Joseph Losey, and NFCC managing director Hassan is the son of a Saudi immigrant. And of course, the music is simply phenomenal, from Dennis Bovell’s pulsating soundtrack to songs by Aswad, Yabby You, Cassandra, Johnny Clarke, I-Roy, and Michael Prophet. In this intensely realistic and deeply involving masterpiece, Rastaman (Cosmo Laidlaw) identifies Africa, Jamaica, and England as the “Babylonian triangle of captivity,” but forty years later it continues to spread far and wide, ensnaring more and more in its hateful reach.
French writer-director Bertrand Blier’s Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is no weepy melodrama. If you need hankies while watching, they’ll be for the tears rolling down your face from laughter. A fortieth-anniversary 2K restoration is screening March 15-21 in the Quad series “Amour or Less: A Blier Buffet,” a nine-film celebration of the five-decade career of the controversial auteur, who has been regularly labeled a misogynist. Get Out Your Handkerchiefs has stirred up its share of naysayers through the years, so it’s fascinating to watch it now, in the midst of the #MeToo movement. The film opens in a restaurant where the brutish, doting Raoul (Gérard Depardieu) is eating with his bored, disinterested wife, Solange (Carole Laure). Suspecting that she is stealing glances at a man seated at a table behind him, Raoul approaches him, a schoolteacher named Stéphane (Patrick Dewaere), and practically begs him to sleep with his wife. Raoul, a driving instructor, loves Solange so much that he is willing to go to great lengths to make her happy, even if it means sharing her bed with another man.
Jia Zhang-Ke reaches into his recent past, and China’s, in his elegiac Ash Is Purest White. In the film, which opens today at the Quad and Lincoln Center, the Sixth Generation writer-director’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao, stars as Qiao, a combination of the characters she played in Jia’s 2002 Unknown Pleasures and 2006 
Award-winning Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Fatal Assistance begins by posting remarkable numbers onscreen: In the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit his native country on January 12, 2010, there were 230,000 deaths, 300,000 wounded, and 1.5 million people homeless, with some 4,000 NGOs coming to Haiti to make use of a promised $11 billion in relief over a five-year period. But as Peck reveals, there is significant controversy over where the money is and how it’s being spent as the troubled Haitian people are still seeking proper health care and a place to live. “The line between intrusion, support, and aid is very fine,” says Jean-Max Bellerive, the Haitian prime minister at the time of the disaster, explaining that too many of the donors want to cherry-pick how their money is used. Bill Vastine, senior “debris” adviser for the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti (CIRH), which was co-chaired by Bellerive and President Bill Clinton, responds, “The international community said they were gonna grant so many billions of dollars to Haiti. That didn’t mean we were gonna send so many billions of dollars to a bank account and let the Haitian government do with it as they will.” Somewhere in the middle is CIRH senior housing adviser Priscilla Phelps, who seems to be the only person who recognizes why the relief effort has turned into a disaster all its own; by the end of the film, she is struggling to hold back tears.
