19 October/20 October 2019 ★ † FT Weekend 13Arts
I
t is not merely as a stunning loca-
tion that San Francisco has estab-
lished itself in cinematic history. It
makes its presence felt in weightier
ways. In Hitchcock’sVertigo 1958),(
its oneiric landscape made sense — just
about — of a deranged story of erotic
obsession; in 1968’s jazzy police thriller
Bullitt, a roller-coaster car chase
through its streets set pulses racing, and
changed the course of action cinema.
InThe Last Black Man in San Francisco,
Joe Talbot’s accomplished debut fea-
ture, the misty city graduates from a
lifetime of supporting roles, and
becomes the star of the movie. Nomi-
nally the loosely autobiographical story
of Talbot’s childhood friend, Jimmie
Fails, the director’s lush and multi-
layered work is a contemporary fable
that brings together dreams and mortar.
It is both deeply romantic and hard-
headed; a specific homage to the city’s
unique character, and a poignant cri-
tique of the kind of careless urban trans-
formation that is happening globally.
Fails, who co-conceived the story,
plays himself as an African American
city native who dreams of reclaiming
the beautiful Victorian home built by
his grandfather in the Fillmore district.
It has now become inaccessible to
him thanks to the wave of gentrification
that has afflicted the city in the years
since he left home. His dreams are nour-
ished by an artist/writer best friend,
Montgomery ( Jonathan Majors), and‘It’s starting to
lose its soul’
Cinema |‘The Last Black Man in San Francisco’ pays
haunting homage to the city’s unique character and
vanishing minority.PeterAspden eets its makersm
Clockwise from
above: Jimmie
Fails (left) with
director Joe
Talbot in San
Francisco;
Danny Glover as
Grandpa Allen,
with Jonathan
Majors as
Montgomery
Allen;
Tichina Arnold
as Wanda Fails;
Fails with
Jonathan Majors
David Moir/A24;
Peter Prato/Eyevineby circumstance: the elderly white
couple living in the house are forced
suddenly to depart, leaving it empty.
Can Jimmie finally make his claim
stick? Or will the inexorable logic and
hustle of the real estate market, fuelled
by the rise of Silicon Valley, obliterate
his aspirations?
The resolution is far from simple, and
fraught with psychic tensions. Existen-
tial questions are thrown up n counter-i
point to the wider sociopolitical drama.
Are Jimmie’s dreams useful to him, or a
distraction? Shouldn’t he, like the city,
just move with the times? A street “cho-
rus” of rappers and poets adds complex-
ity rather than clarification. A beauti-
fully curated soundtrack, including
Michael Nyman’s radiantMusique à
Grande Vitesse High-Speed Music) and(
a haunting a cappella version of Scott
McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to
WearFlowers in Your Hair)”, embellish
Talbot’s ravishing images.
The 29-year-old director describes his
relationship with the city as “very, very
complicated”. “I grew up on the stories
of old San Francisco,” he says. “My
grandmother was a Rosie-the-Riveter
worker in world war two, and my
mother and father met on [San Fran-
cisco newspaper] The Examiner.” (Tal-
bot’s father David wrote the acclaimed
2012 history of the city,Season of the
Witch.) “I always felt very lucky to live in
a place that championed many of the
ideals that would spread to the rest ofAmerica. And I realiseda lot of those
values were fought for and established
through bloody battles in the street.”
The possibility that those battles
might have been in vain helped inspire
the film, which nevertheless opts for
poetryover crude polemics. “The city is
not the same as when I was growing up,”
says Talbot. “It is pushing out those peo-
ple who made it what it was: the out-
casts, the freaks, progressives, artists.
Growing up, it was a humbling experi-
ence walking around it on any given day.
Now, it is in a strange state.”
Fails describes the movie as a “Valen-
tine” to the city, but he too acknowl-
edges mixed feelings. “I love the city, it
made me who I am, I love the people
there who have been in my life. It is very
beautiful. But it is changing. It feels less
communal, and like it is starting to lose
its soul. A lot of its culture is being
ripped out, because its people are being
ripped out.” African Americans now
comprise just 5 per cent of thepopula-
tion, compared to more than 13 per cent
in 1970, when the Fillmore district was
known as the “Harlem of the west”.
The idea to turn Fails’s obsession with
his childhood home into fiction germi-
nated in his years of conversations with
Talbot. “We were just being friends,walking and talking for hours,” says
Fails. “I moved in with him and his fam-
ily, and [he] was being creative all the
time.Thenpeople around us started to
believe we could actually tell this story,
and that gave us a lot of confidence.”
Those discussions, and the subse-
quent participation of a wider circle of
friends, helped to refine the vision of the
movie. “We got a lot more time than
most,” says Talbot. “A lot of independ-
ent movies are rushed into production.
We had many drafts of this story which,
to be honest, were not very good. If we
had been able to make it a few years ear-
lier, it wouldn’t have had all the nuances
that became part of the movie.
“We had the chance to slow-bake it
with smart people, to ruminate on
things and deepen the characters.” The
“smart people”included Danny Glover,
who grew up in the Fillmore and plays
Montgomery’s grandfather, and pro-
ducers from Plan B, Brad Pitt’s produc-
tion company. The film picked up two
awards, including best drama director,
at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Talbot believes the involvement of
local people in every stage of production
is responsible for the polished portrayal
of its deeper truths. “Even when you feel
you know what you are doing, you need
those trusted voices around you,” he
says. The organic nature of the movie-
making gaveThe Last Black Manits
sharp tang of authenticity. One member
of the “Greek chorus” is played by Jamal
Trulove, who was framed by police for a
2007 murder and wrongfully impris-
oned for more than six years before his
acquittal in 2015. He received a $13m
settlement from the city days before
production started. Another tale fromthe city, another blurring of fact and fic-
tion: the owner of the house that was
used to stand in for Jimmie’s childhood
home was an octogenarian who had
moved in during the 1960s with his Afri-
can-American gay partner, before leav-
ing to live in Egypt. He returned years
later, found the house had been split
into apartments, and then bought it
back to restore it to its former condition.
“One funny thing about San Francisco
is how many people, even the outlaws,
of past generations return and integrate
themselvestoday,” says Talbot. “My
brother went to high school with the son
of Bill Harris, who came to PTA and
seemed like a normal dad — except he
[had] kidnapped Patty Hearst.”
Notwithstanding its candour and lyri-
cism, the film has a melancholy air, I say
to him. Is he optimistic about the city’s
future? Complacency is the enemy, he
says. “All these people who say, ‘Oh, I
believe San Francisco will always be
OK’, that is so troubling. That is not how
this works. You have tofight for this
f***ing city. And I see peopledoing so
much more than just making a movie.
Those people are doing the heroic work.
I see enough of that to give me hope.”In cinemas from October 25‘The city is pushing out
those people who made it
what it was: the outcasts,freaks, progressives, artists’
S
tressed and sweaty,three Isis
operatives are captured by
coastguards off the coast of
Kerala and transported to
Mumbai for interrogation,
where they escape during a bloody
shootout. On their tail is Srikant, a har-
assed middle-aged suburbanite and star
agent with the National Investigation
Agency, whohad failed to take them
into custody because he skipped work
to plead with his daughter’s headmis-
tress to show leniency after the adoles-
cent was caught withdrugs at school.
This is how the first episode ofThe
Family Manopens. Amazon Prime’s lat-
est Hindi-language TV series, released
last month, is a very Indian version of
the Netflix seriesFauda —about an
Israeli counter-terrorism unit — that
artfully blends narratives about Islamist
threats to national security with those
dealing with the difficulties posed by
problem teenagers, the division of
domestic chores, and the pressing need
to obtain a cheap home loan.
While it is not a piece of tub-thumping
jingoism, the series is the latest example
of the increasing rise of patriotic — some
would say nationalistic — themes in
Indian television and cinema, particu-
larly in those productions aimed at an
urban middle-class audience that tends
to support Prime Minister Narendra
Modi and his nationalist ruling BJP. Sri-
kant, for instance, is gently shown to be
a religious Hindu who practises yogic
breathing each morning before the day’s
assignment buzzes through on his
smartphone. He even advises his col-
league to chant a Ganesha mantra as he
talks down a nervous young machine-
gun-toting jihadi.Leavened with humour and a com-
passionate portrayal of a terrorist, it’s
still a clearly political storyline that pits
a patriotic Hindu against a naive Mus-
lim recruited into jihadism. Subsequent
episodes, however, have strayed from
the path of mainstream orthodoxy. Last
weekend, the show drew the ire of the
RSS, a sister organisation of the BJP; one
of its publications objected to the show’s
female spook questioning the morality
of the Indian army’s conduct while
fighting militancy in Kashmir.
Presciently written last year, the epi-
sode depicts a communications black-
out in the state, mirroring the one cur-
rently in place after the government
revoked Kashmir’s semi-autonomy in
August and brought it under direct rule
from Delhi.
Written for an e ducate d and
upwardly mobile audience,The Family
Mancontains a layer of political com-
plexity that Bollywood movies are quite
happy to junk altogether. This year’sPM
Narendra Modi, a hagiography starring
Vivek Oberoi, was banned during the
election campaign but went on to earn
Rs230m (£2.5m), having been made on
a budget of Rs80m.
With such a return on investment, it’s
no surprise that India’s film industry,
like Hollywood during the cold war era,
has been churning out material in which
the likes of Sylvester Stallone would feel
at home. Last year’s action movie,Uri:
The Surgical Strike, based on an attack in
Pakistani-administered Kashmir by the
Indian military in retaliation for a ter-
rorist outrage, grossed almost Rs3.5bn.
One of the movie’s lines, “How’s the
josh?” (“How’s the enthusiasm?”), was
to be repeated in the Twitter banteringsof senior BJP politicians and the prime
minister.
“We put the customer first,” says
Vijay Subramaniam, director of content
for Amazon Prime Video, India, when I
ask him about his company’s decision to
screenThe Family Man. “It’s about cater-
ing to their taste, and backing stories
that can bring this genre to a young and
confident country.”
The show has already been commis-
sioned for a second season. Its creators,
Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK,former
software engineers who met in the US,
and both big fans of American indie cin-
ema, have put a distinctly post-slacker
spin on the story, writing it with a
“certain quirk and sense of humour”,
according to DK.
“We took the glamour out of it,” says
Nidimoru. “It’s not James Bond. It’s
without the gadgets, cars and women.We treat spying like any other govern-
ment job, with a matter-of-fact
approach. It’s about ordinary people
doing extraordinary things.”
When asked about the current popu-
larity of nationalist themes in films and
TV, he replies: “Everyone in India wants
to see the country portrayed positively.
Patriotism has definitely become more
common.” But the characters in his
show “aren’t wearing it on their sleeves.
Sometimes they’re doing their duty in a
very grudging way.” Indeed, Srikant
often seems driven to do his job more
by the desire to expedite a government
mortgage, and thus placate his
demanding wife, than by a devotion to
the motherland.
Among India’s critics and reviewers,
there is some alarm at the growing trend
for flag-waving. “India, in my opinion,”
leading reviewer Tanul Thakur tells me,“has historically been an ‘emasculated’
country — third-world, emaciated,
struggling, not ‘man enough’ o standt
on its own. Modi and his cohorts
have given the majority something to
hold on to. ‘This is the new India’, as a
character modelled after the country’s
current national security adviser [Ajit
Doval] says inUri. ‘It will enter the
house and kill.’ ”Thakur reels off a list of films he finds
problematic: “The Accidental Prime Min-
ister, starring Anupam Kher, a well-
known actor, also a noted BJP supporter,
portrayed India’s ex-prime minister
Manmohan Singh as a servile, ludicrous
caricature... Buddha in a Traffic Jam
andThe Tashkent Files— vociferous in its
criticisms of Maoists, ‘intellectual ter-
rorists’, and the Congress party — are
pretty on the nose, too.”
But rather than beingsolely propa-
ganda, he believes “such films are
motivated by personal profit. Vivek
Oberoi, who played Modi inPM Naren-
dra Modi, was holding on to a fading
career. He saw in Modi a ‘saviour’ not
just of the nation but also his own career.
It’s not about patriotism; it’s not about
quiet pride; it’s chest-beating, simplistic
cinema made by, and starring, people
who want to profit from a changing
national mood.”
Even A-list actresses such as DeepikaPadukone and Kangana Ranaut have
struck combined blows for blockbuster
feminism and nationalism while play-
ing heroines from Indian history. In last
year’sPadmaavat, Padukone played a
legendary 13th-century Rajput queen
who, along with her countrywomen,
committed suicide rather than be cap-
tured by an invading Muslim army. The
movie was one of the highest-earning in
Indian history, grossing almost Rs6bn.
Ranaut starred inManikarnika, based
on the story of Lakshmibai, the Rani of
Jhansi, who fought for independence in
1857, revelling in the gory slaughter of
her enemies —the British — who are por-
trayed s ruthless and inhuman devils.a
It’s no coincidence that for the past
four years India’s highest-paid actor,
Akshay Kumar, has released a patriotic
movie each year on India’s independ-
ence day, including last August’sMission
Mangalabout the country’s space expe-
dition to Mars.
The leading Bollywood producer,
Vikram Malhotra, chief executive of
Abundantia Entertainment, has worked
with Kumar on several films, notably
Toilet: A Love Story, a romantic comedy
that chimed with the government’s
flagship policy of improving rural
sanitation.Malhotra has no qualms
about putting patriotism at the centre
of movies.
“There is much more confidence in
Indians now, seeing [Modi] hold his own
on the world stage,” he says. “The patri-
otism is proud and robust in its expres-
sion with the country having come into
its own over the past 15-20 years. And
it’s only growing, it’s nowhere near satu-
ration point. A lot more stories based on
this theme are going to be told.”Family dramas that reflect the national mood
Film in India |Nirpal Dhaliwal aces the rise of patriotic — even nationalistic — themes in the country’s Hindi-language television and cinematr
‘Everyone in India wants to
see the country portrayed
positively. Patriotism hasbecome more common’
Manoj Bajpayee as Srikant in Amazon Prime’s ‘The Family Man’OCTOBER 19 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201917/ - 17:43 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WKD13, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 13, 1