The New American Feature Film That Restored My Faith in Cinema

Cinema died the moment we stopped antagonizing the Hollywood system. It died when filmmakers stopped being critics, when critics stopped becoming filmmakers, when actors ceased sacrificing themselves on the altars, when directors ceased shooting movies instead of bullets. Everyone thinks they know cinema. Nothing could be further from the truth. And now, Jacinto Taras Riddick and Che Ayende have partnered to give us not only the best collaboration in cinema of the past year, but a shocking example of the concussive force of writing, directing and performing for the screen that I have been waiting to see for a long time. I went into the Tribeca screening room April 10 a lapsed filmmaker, and emerged with my faith restored.

There are very few moments in life when this happens. One must be grateful for them. And grateful that strong films are being made with all the blood, guts and sweat that comprise the human truth bearer. Like plays, films are not written — they are wrought. Who else to understand this but a Black conscious man who is both an actor and a boxer and who made his directorial debut as if he was being dared to reclaim his position in the ring?

written by Dennis Leroy Kangalee

It starts off like a page from a lost story by novelists John O. Killens (And Then We Heard The Thunder)  or Leonard Gardner (Fat City). One-time pugilist and military lifer Solomon Bordeaux returns home to Brooklyn after serving three tours of the Iraq-Afghanistan Wars. To say he is a walking time-bomb is an understatement as PTSD underlies everything he does, says and thinks.  Rendered with a chilling ease by the author himself, Jacinto Taras Riddick, Solomon’s just left one war, to wreak havoc in another.  But war is havoc.  Perhaps I should say Solomon is simply looking for the holes where peace is available.  Not to savor or worship them but to destroy them and make sure no one else ever comes close to even glimpsing them.  Beyond his Marine-psychosis, his virulent homophobia, and his understandable rage at the establishment’s racism (he, ironically, like all the villains has the most truthful lines about society even though he is the society he claims he hates!) Solomon is a Caliban – a grotesque persona that simply reflects the disease of the zeitgeist. He hates not only all that is hateful…but all that can be beautiful as well.

Waking up to the brutal fact of gentrification (a blatant theme and springboard of one of the film’s most powerful scenes) in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn for example - is almost more alarming to him than bodies being blown apart in the desert - all in the name of American imperialism.  Solomon is neither a Nationalist nor a covert radical.  He is simply an American soldier badly mangled from the perversity of American style racism and the scars won from his reach towards masculinity. He is a character we’re accustomed to on screen, for his tentacles stretch far and wide in cinema’s boudoir.  He could have been a rogue maniac from Full Metal Jacket or the opposite side of the coin to the seldom-seen masterpiece, Ashes & Embers by Haile Gerima, to this day the greatest film to express the horror of being a Black American soldier fighting war at home and abroad. What is fresh about this characterization, however, is the political consciousness he possesses despite his warped logic.

Unfortunately, under capitalism all human beings are warriors. The war inside mirrors the war outside.  This is no better exemplified than the character of David, Solomon’s brother.  Played with extraordinary restraint by Che Ayende, in the best performance of his career thus far.  David is a closeted bisexual man who struggles to not only “pass” as straight, but to play at being a willfully satisfied hubsand to his wife Leona (Lekethia Dalcoe). 

A breezy 69 minutes, A Brother’s Whisper is intense and plays like an early Pinter play.  It is seeped in tension (the early dinner scene is an excellent example) Riddick has made a taut and disturbing film about masculine-feminine binaries, truth, love and the psychosis within - as a result of denying one’s self.  It is a sneering look into the American underbelly, as well as the entire world’s obsession with sexuality, identity, and how things are “supposed to be.”  Riddick himself declared he wanted to make a film that showed a bit of what “society has bestowed upon us.”

 The film’s claustrophobic and unpretentious intimacy will promote debate and reflection.

 As Leona, Lekethia Dalcoe brings a sultry jitteriness to the screen. She is a wonder of her own;  and like Ayende, she acts from the inside out. What could easily have been a perfunctory second-fiddle role becomes dignified and unforgettable.  This is mainly in between the lines via her ethereally  cocked head or her eyes – always on the verge of - tears, it seems. 

Another impressive supporting role is Gabriel, David’s lover, played by an excellent James T. Alfred, who brings an incomprehensible blend of the ridiculous and the profound at once. Alfred’s Gabriel is a proud gay man, but also an insightful one - he knows the score and he may be the only one who sees where David is heading.  Gabriel is tortured by the fact that he and David must live a clandestine affair because of David’s inability to break free.  David is sealed in a spiritual prison (the proverbial “closet”), so far gone that the religious implications of the names - Solomon, Gabriel, etc. - give you chills halfway into the picture when Leviticus seems to take over as a glaring hint as to what is now taking over.  Leviticus is the book of morals and laws set down by God in the Old Testament. The film’s power lays in the spiritual evocation of all this despite how succinct the Old Testament declarations are in the film.  In perhaps the most chilling scene,“Leviticus” becomes David and Gabriel’s only way of reaching each other; a demented code…for a demented world.  What else can the world be for two lovers who struggle to exist together in the same world?

Where does boxing fit into all this?  Aside from the obvious cliches of boxing being the tough guy’s ballet and the glove his slipper, boxing holds many metaphors and serves many purposes in both art and in life.  In the film, it’s a milieu of the world that reflects the harshness of the world outside, it is the symbolic war zone where egos, careers, dignities are made or salvaged; where enemies demolished…where poetry attained, even if just for a moment.

In the boxing scenes there is a sense of camaraderie and love seldom seen in American feature films, especially between two Black men, Solomon and David, two brothers who understand more than they let on and are more similar than either dares to realize.

The training sequences themselves are sheer poetry. Riddick reveals his own knack for bringing an audience into his world (he is a boxing coach himself in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn) and for making us see boxing the way he does. Riddick shows us a whole new world in the boxing environment despite how many times cinema has regaled and exploited this holy art of the “sweet science.” 

From Ralph Ellison’s horrifying boxing scenes in Invisible Man to Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight to our culture’s obsession with the Black consciousness of boxing from Jack Johnson to Ali (Jones, for example, in The Great White Hope ) to the valorized subtle racism of Rocky to Eastwood’s schmaltzy Million Dollar Baby love story to Robert De Niro’s triumphant turn as Jake LaMotta in Scorsese’s masterpiece, Raging Bull – boxing has been the subconscious default for all our fears, desires, metaphors, acting decisions, you name it.   While it will always mirror the poor oppressed man’s personal vendetta against the capitalist structure around him and a way to get out of it, boxing is also a confession and poem to the boxer themselves.  In A Brother’s Whisper, it is David’s way of living in the moment (like an actor!) and not worrying about life outside the ring.  Because what is life outside the ring?  Perhaps there isn’t one.  That can be taken many ways.  David learns this the hard way, we are reminded stealthily and directly through the last half hour of the film.

Jeffrey Ackers wonderful cinematography and Kathleen McAuley’s editing (watch out Thelma Schoonmaker!) brings out an energy and absorbing thrill during each and every boxing sequence.  The film’s gently muted colors grant the film an even subtler dramatic dimension and seems to enable the sadness of the film’s mood. 

The superb sound design (Nick Long, Edward Morris II) and music (Antonio Hart, Preston Riddick, Resura) adds to the minimalist precision of the film.  Whisper makes use of Warren Parker’s “Tell it Like it Is” (Parlo-Enterprises), performed by Aaron Neville, in key moments (notably the opening and closing of the movie), but Neville’s’ crooning triples in meanings and while initially cloying, it almost lends itself to a transcendental feel. 

Cinema and Tragedy

Tragedy is a forlorn art, a theatrical genre that our generation demeaned some time ago in favor of a distorted application of irony and the American drive to take nothing quite “serious.” It’s not “cool” to feel or lose control of our emotions…Art can simply remind us that we feel. Forget about saving the world or “instructions.” We need to feel. And this is why tragedy scares us. Pushing beyond melodrama, tragedy exists when fine characterization and action take over language and big emotions.  It is often the gestalt, the defining action of a tragedy that we are left reeling from.  And there is no way out or tragedy.  It forces us to confront ourselves. 

If Edward Norton, Heath Ledger - actors who were or are close to their white audience’s neurosis - and Paul Shrader’s last two leading men (Ethan Hawke, Oscar Isaac) are representatives of Generation X’s white bohemian angst, then Che Ayende is most certainly the Black counterpart.  Better, he is simply the tragic hero of Generation X period.  

Twenty years ago I had the privilege (and I daren’t use that word lightly) of collaborating with Che Ayende when we broke ground in our lo-fi epic As an Act of Protest.  A tragedy about a Black actor who gives up his art for revolution amidst a holocaust engulfing him – set during Mayor Giuiliani’s police brutality reign in NYC during the 1990s).  As Cairo, the main character searching for ways to eradicate racism, Ayende had the ability to draw in an audience as well as he was able to aggravate them. His brooding and seductive energy as if “Monty Clift were a tortured Black radical” as Katherine Cleaver once described.

As David, Ayende is once again transmitting all the modern neurosis and fears in our pandemic-Trump world now; his David is trying to break free like Cairo. But Protest was a missile from the youth.  Whisper is the horror of adulthood.  

Ayende’s Cairo gave voice to the youthful anger and desperation, it was Hamlet.

Twenty years later, David is Ayende’s mid-late period; far from Lear but caught somewhere between Macbeth and the humiliation of Timon….

Filmmakers come out of all closets when the “secret truth” of their own internal meanings become exposed. It’s less cryptic and neurotic than I am making it sound. Whisper simply has as much to say about art and truth as it does about repression and homosexuality in the Black community and the world at large.

Riddick gives us just enough rope to hang ourselves as the catharsis strikes towards the end - as he incurs us to climb upwards. One man’s noose is another man’s life-raft. One doesn’t have to be a Freudian nor Frances Cress Welsing to appreciate that Riddick is clearly stating that to live one’s truth - to be honest - is to invite death. To confront the horror of our time is to risk everything.

Is it worth it?

Absolutely. And not only in the realm of art. The freedoms one gets from self liberation are too dense and numerous to explain.

Self liberation, which is a double edged sword (yes the HOW the sword is wielded is important) comes traumatically and briefly to David — one cannot wonder as a willfully engaged spectator if they themselves have ever been as free as Ayende is in the moments leading up to the horrifying conclusion. The incredible coda is so beautiful and shocking— there is no time to even consider what has occurred until it happens. It stunningly recalls the spirit of Mishima and Ntzoke Shange and it is forever a hallmark of powerful cinema, a freak-flag has been planted!  Cinema wasn’t always lurid and boring and safe as it seems in the 21st century but we must remember it is still very young. And it’s these moments that keep it afloat, keep it moving…

As we descend into the end of the first quarter of the 21 century, I feel that film and drama are beginning to find their feet again.

Let’s not say it too loudly, for fear of jinxing something marvelous. But this film is definitely worth an announcement from the top of the mountain and from the valley below, in a booming voice - not a shrill scream (save that for the enemy) — as shamans are less interested in warding off demons than they are in healing the angels.

 A Brother’s Whisper does both.

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Dennis Leroy Kangalee

Jackson Heights, NY

June 3, 2022