REVIEWS
72 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
The most moving homecoming that I know of
in American pictures occurs in Nicholas Ray’s
The Lusty Men (1952), as Robert Mitchum’s Jeff
McCloud returns to the farm where he spent his
boyhood, now run to rot, though his adolescent
cubby-hole hiding space still holds a rodeo
bill, cap pistol and other relics of a long-lost
childhood. The cultural context of the scene is
specifically white and rural, though changes
in the 21st-century cityscape – as white flight
reverses, and the moneyed, professional classes
reoccupy the urban cores that their parents
and grandparents fled – make the possibility
of an urban black answer to this melancholy
moment especially plangent. Someday, I’m
convinced, someone will make that movie. The
Last Black Man in San Francisco, however, ain’t it.
Pride of property, and the sense of faded
grandeur that settles in when that pride is
taken away, are at the centre of debut director
Joe Talbot’s film. The story is based on the life
experience of Talbot’s co-writer Jimmie Fails, who
stars as a character named Jimmie Fails. Jimmie
is introduced crashing with aspiring playwright
friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) at the home of
Mont’s blind grandfather (Danny Glover), and
the two are regularly roasted by a congregation
of tough-guy street-corner knuckleheads, for
whom these serious young men with their artistic
orientations are immediately suspect. The jibes
are unfounded. If there is nothing resembling
a heterosexual romance in the film, there is
likewise little on which to hang a homoerotic
subtext – in fact, Jimmie and Mont come off as
two twentysomethings singularly uninterested
in sex, at times almost ethereally cerebral.
Jimmie’s creative outlet is the Victorian-
style house in the Fillmore District that once
belonged to his grandfather, a leading black San
Franciscan, but which has long since passed
into other hands. When the house is suddenly
left vacant, Jimmie moves back in, occupying
what looks like a Millionaire’s Row residence of
the 19th century but which Jimmie insists was
built from the ground up by his Southern-born
grandfather in 1946. Granddad, the story goes,
didn’t want to take over one of the homes in the
neighbourhood lost by Japanese-Americans
on their way to the internment camps.
This premise offers a great deal to chew on
- the idea of the city and the neighbourhood
as entities in flux due to various migrant and
immigrant waves, the complicated relationships
between black and Japanese-American
families, houses whose status markers refer to
a specifically Euro-American ideal of culture.
But while Talbot and Fails avoid turning their
homespun homesick story into an unwieldy and
self-important metaphor for Black American
Experience in total, creeping bloat makes itself
felt elsewhere, The Last Black Man in San Francisco
being stylistically overwrought from an early
skateboarding overture that seeks to crescendo
the viewer into submission. The belaboured
cinematography conveys a desire to overwhelm
but little in the way of subjective-impressionist
or objective-documentary interest, leaving our
protagonists well lit but curiously ill defined.
Jimmie’s final appearance rowing out into San
Francisco Bay reads as an escape, yes – but that
of an exasperated writer looking for an out, not a
flesh-and-blood man with no direction home.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
USA 2019
Director: Joe Talbot
San Francisco, present day. Jimmie Fails lives with his
friend Mont and Mont’s blind grandfather. When not
working at an assisted living centre for seniors, Jimmie
renovates a house in the Fillmore District, to the ire
of the home’s current residents. One day, he finds the
residents being removed, and learns that the house is
now locked up owing to a legal quarrel over ownership,
and is likely to be left unoccupied. Jimmie moves
into the house, which we learn is his childhood home,
and which he believes was built by his grandfather in
1946, only to be lost by his drug-addicted father in the
1990s. Obtaining original furnishings from his aunt
Wanda, Jimmie restores the house to something of its
original splendour, and is joined there by Mont. One
night, they are also joined by Kofi, a childhood friend
who now hangs out with neighbourhood toughs, and
who is later killed in a street scuffle. Jimmie finds his
grandfather’s furniture moved on to the kerb outside
the house, which is now being prepared for sale. Mont,
in a bid to save the house, visits the realtor, who reveals
that it was not, in fact, built by Jimmie’s grandfather.
Mont delivers this news to Jimmie in an amateur
theatrical production that doubles as a eulogy to Kofi.
The two friends move back in with Mont’s grandfather.
Soon afterwards, Jimmie departs for an unknown
destination, rowing out into the San Francisco Bay.
Produced by
Khaliah Neal
Joe Talbot
Dede Gardner
Jeremy Kleiner
Christina Oh
Written by
Joe Talbot
Rob Richert
Story
Jimmie Fails
Joe Talbot
Director of
Photography
Adam Newport-Berra
Edited by
David Marks
Production Designer
Jona Tochet
Music
Emile Mosseri
Sound Mixer
Sage Bilderback
Costume Designer
Amanda Ramirez
©A24 Distribution
LLC
Production
Companies
A24 presents a Plan
B Entertainment
production in
association
with Longshot
Features and Mavia
Entertainment
Made with support
from Cinereach,
IFP, the SFFILM
Rainin Grant
Executive Producers
Brad Pitt
Sarah Esberg
Kimberley Parker
Cast
Jimmie Fails
Jimmie Fails
Jonathan Majors
Montgomery Allen
Tichina Arnold
Wanda Fails
Rob Morgan
James Sr
Mike Epps
Bobby
Finn Whitrock
Clayton
Thora Birch
Becca
Danny Glover
Grandpa Allen
Jamal Trulove
Kofi
Dolby Digital
In Colour
[1.66:1]
Distributor
Universal Pictures
International
UK & Eire
Homecoming: Jonathan Majors, Jimmie Fails
Credits and Synopsis
drug use, are filmed by Agassi himself
and edited into the film. But despite the
footage of a lonely man seemingly embracing
destructive tendencies, the documentary seldom
feels exploitative. In fact, the final disturbing
scenes provoke the filmmaker to intervene.
Despite his complexities, the most
interesting person in the documentary is
not Agassi but Anna. Delighting in her son’s
success and apparent happiness, furious
when she hears of her ex-husband’s lies about
the causes of her mental-health issues, she
is an intriguing and sympathetic character.
Meanwhile, the centrepiece meeting between
Agassi and his father, built up as a monster
in his life, is chillingly understated, as the
older man shrugs off responsibility in a
quiet display of fecklessness and self-pity.
Unusually for a porn star constantly thrown
into uber-macho sex scenarios, Agassi embraces
his feminine side. He discusses his gender
confusion when he was a boy and mocks the
misogynist posturing of some other gay men.
Poignantly, he emulates Hollywood divas. His
escort work, he insists, is “not prostitution. It’s
Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.” In the chilling
last line of the film, he compares himself to
Marilyn Monroe, as he may share her fate.
When the film was screened at this year’s BFI
Flare: London LGBTQ+ Film Festival, a phone
call to Agassi revealed that he is now doing well
and working temporarily in a kiosk, a sunnier
ending than predicted by Heymann’s film.
A documentary about Israeli gay pornographic
actor Jonathan Agassi, the stage name of Yonatan
Langer, who divides his time between Berlin and
Tel Aviv, where his supportive mother lives. Agassi
talks about his father leaving his family when he
was a baby and his feelings of abandonment; being
bullied at school for being effeminate; and his
success as a porn actor following his breakthrough
in the 2019 film ‘Men of Israel’. As well as performing
in live sex shows, Agassi works as an escort.
A reunion with his father goes badly and
distresses his mother. Agassi becomes addicted
to crystal meth. He collapses in the street,
provoking intervention from the filmmaker. In
the closing moments of the documentary, he
says he “can see the end of Jonathan Agassi”.
Producers
Barak Heymann
Tomer Heymann
Written by
Tomer Heymann
Cinematographers
Addie Reiss
Tomer Heymann
Editors
Tal Rabiner
Alex Khosid
Original Music
Alberto Shwartz
Matan Daskal
Anna Lann
Sound Design & Mix
Itzik Cohen
©Heymann
Brothers Films
Production
Companies
BBC Storyville
Hot 8 presents
Israel Ministry
of Culture and
Sport, The Israel
Film Council,
Makor Foundation,
Mifal Hapais
Heymann
Brothers Films
A film by Tomer
Heymann
With the
participation of
the Leon Recanati
Foundation
Supported by
the Cultural
Administration,
Israel Ministry of
Culture and Sport
The Israel Film
Council , TLVFest
With the support
of the Israel
Lottery Council for
Culture & Arts
With the
endorsement of
CoPro Documentary
and Animation
Marketing
Foundation RA
In association
with the BBC
In Colour
[1.78:1]
Part-subtitled
Distributor
Peccadillo
Pictures Ltd
Israeli theatrical title
Yonatan Agassi
hetzil et kha’yai
Credits and Synopsis
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Reviews, 15
