I had been curious about seeing Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song -- checking the correct number of A's and S's, and confirming -- ever since I saw the movie about the making of that movie, made by the son of its director.
Mario Van Peebles directed the movie Baadasssss! in 2003, and he plays the role of his father, Melvin, who wrote, directed, produced, edited and starred in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song back in 1971. As an interesting side note, Mario also appears in the movie as the 13-year-old version of the character his father plays for the rest of the movie.
Having vaguely understood that this was a significant movie in the history of blaxploitation, I found that a little funny because I never considered Mario Van Peebles to be quite that black. Now, it's highly problematic to tell somebody they aren't "black enough," and that's not really what I mean. More than anything, I mean that Mario Van Peebles never struck me as someone who particularly bucked the system or fought for the rights of people who looked like him. I didn't see any of the Mario Van Peebles movies that might have undercut my impression of him -- for example, New Jack City is a notable omission. But he always profiled as someone who went down easily and was not very confrontational.
His father's movie does not go down easily and is highly confrontational.
In fact, at first, I had no idea what to make of it. This is a genuine arthouse movie, the first such I've encountered in this series. While the movies I've seen so far have showcased both the grit and the humor of blaxploitation, they have all stayed within bounds in terms of the narrative. Even a fairly outlandish narrative like the one in Petey Wheatstraw is still something that is more or less easy to follow.
Well, Melvin Van Peebles wanted to make this movie his way. He had made the studio film Watermelon Man the year before in 1970, and apparently didn't take to the rules and restrictions of a studio film. So he blew that all up and made a movie so experimental that it leaves you scratching your head for large quantities of it, until at some point you decide it might be brilliant.
There isn't much of a plot in the movie, and what is there has been forgotten to me in the nine days since I watched it. (I really would have been better off writing this post straight away, but life doesn't always work out that way.) What I can tell you is that the main character, who bristles against the system the whole movie, is known for his "sweet back" and for having intercourse with various women as a sort of performance art in groovy settings that are into that sort of thing. (Er, whorehouses I guess.) At some point in his young adult life he runs afoul of the police, getting caught in a scenario where the cops were trying to frame him and a couple of the officers ended up being killed. This puts him on the run for most of the movie as corrupt and blatantly racist officers try to track him down, and we see his interactions with various other characters throughout. (Including, I was pleased to see, a young John Amos as a biker, who is billed as "Johnny Amos.")
The movie has all sorts of elliptical editing, quick cuts, half-seen camera angles, interesting uses of close-ups and slo-mo, and a soundtrack of what I might call "protest soul" by Brer Soul and Earth Wind & Fire that is equal parts joyous, chaotic and desperate. This movie is a scream of rage against the establishment in the package of a cool 70s movie that is constantly in dialogue with the racism of society, but rarely in ways you can easily parse.
If you want to understand where this movie is coming from, in the opening credits it describes itself as starring "the black community," and is dedicated to "All the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man." In reading up a bit more about it now, I see it is rightly described as a "picaresque." That's a good word and I should use it more often.
I see also that the film is considered instrumental in the creation of the blaxploitation genre. So if I am considering its style and rhythms to be an outlier in what I have seen so far, that may be because other blaxploitation films realized that they could not be quite so abstruse and still connect with an audience, even though SSBS seemed to pull that off just fine. (And while we're talking about the inception of blaxploitation, I should say that two of the films I've watched, Shaft and They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!, are actually direct contemporaries of SSBS, so which chicken hatched out of which egg at which time is a subject of some uncertainty and/or disagreement.)
I was flummoxed by large sections of this film, and it took me a really long time to decide it was not a slog. The realization I really had, as I was going, was that this movie did not want to feed me easily understandable narrative beats with conventional satisfactions. That's beside the point of what this movie is trying to accomplish, as this movie defines itself by being different. And the technique applied to making it distinct represents a true artist's understanding of the tools of cinema, and how to blow them up and use them in confronting ways. You can't make something so shaggy and ragged unless you understand exactly the things against which you are contrasting it.
I doubt I will ever see Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song again, but I respect it immensely -- and I think there is a good chance it will make me curious enough to revisit Mario's homage to his father, who was still living and continued to be so until 2021, the aforementioned Baadasssss!
On to May.
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