[In “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” the desire for home
is at once existential and literal, a matter of self and safety, being
and belonging. This is, of course, part of the story of being black in
the United States.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO’ - LOST IN A DREAM CITY  
[[link removed]]


 

Manohla Dargis
June 6, 2019
The New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ In “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” the desire for home
is at once existential and literal, a matter of self and safety, being
and belonging. This is, of course, part of the story of being black in
the United States. _

Film Poster 'Last Black Man in San Fracisco', Posterati

 

 

RELEASED THEATRICALLY IN 2019; THE FILM IS NOW STREAMING OF NETFLIX. 

The astonishing “Last Black Man in San Francisco” is about having
little in a grab-what-you-can world. It’s the haunting, elegiac
story of Jimmie Fails — playing a version of himself — a young man
trying to hold onto a sense of home in San Francisco. His parents are
missing in action and someone else lives in the family’s old house.
Given to dreamy, faraway looks, Jimmie seems not quite there, either.
But he remains tethered to the city, somehow exalted by it. And when
he slaloms down its hills on his skateboard, he doesn’t descend —
he soars.

The movie was directed by Joe Talbot, a longtime friend of Fails’s,
and together they came up with a story grounded in life. Like
Jimmie’s family, Fails’s also lost its home, and he and his father
— played by Rob Morgan in a brief, piercing turn — bedded down in
their car. It’s a plaintive American narrative that here becomes an
expressionistic odyssey, both rapturous and melancholic. In moments it
feels as if Jimmie and his faithful artistic friend, Montgomery
(Jonathan Majors, a mournful heartbreaker), are dreaming the movie
into existence, pouring its surrealistic jolts and hallucinatory
beauty out of their heads and straight into yours.

The story drifts in, as if taking its cue from the fog. Jimmie works
at a nursing home, but with no home to call his own, he flops at
Mont’s grandfather’s house, a proud and cramped relic facing a
polluted bay. There is an ease to the men’s intimacy, a feeling of
refuge that wraps around them whether they’re talking or watching
old films with Mont’s blind grandfather (Danny Glover, a monumental
presence). Early on, the three watch the 1949 noir “D.O.A.,”
[[link removed]] raptly
attentive as Edmond O’Brien reports a murder (his own!) in San
Francisco, Mont narrating each beat for his granddad.

The tiny audience basking in the flickering light makes for a
charmingly eccentric tableau. In another movie, it might read as
decorative filler, the kind filmmakers use to mortar together
story-advancing scenes. Except that everything counts: the specter of
death, Mont’s narration, Jimmie’s perch on the floor. Each detail
adds meaning to a story that builds associatively and obliquely, and
often through nods rather than shouts. Jimmie is safely huddled in
this room, but loss — of his parents, home and city — pervades his
life, which means that (just like Edmond O’Brien’s) his future
might be lost too.

Much of the story and its tension involve Jimmie’s stubborn claim on
his family’s former house, a majestic Victorian in the Fillmore
district [[link removed]]. An
older white man and woman live there now, which doesn’t stop Jimmie
from rebuking them about the garden or propping up a ladder to paint a
windowsill. When they leave for good, Jimmie surreptitiously moves in,
filling the wood-paneled rooms with the furnishings that his father
didn’t lose during the family’s grimmer times. Mont moves in too
and it’s there that he will at last turn his ideas — the scribbles
and delicate drawings that fill his red notebook — into a climatic,
reflexive theatrical performance.

This more or less explains what happens, but it’s the _how_ that
matters in “Last Black Man.” This is, remarkably, the first
feature directed by Talbot, who shares screenwriting credit with Rob
Richert. The story has a clear through line in Jimmie’s odyssey back
home and beyond. When he’s not staring into the distance (an
untrained performer, Fails has a face for contemplation), Jimmie is on
the move, storming San Francisco on his skateboard or rowing off in a
fantasy. Mostly, the movie has a cascade of images and ideas,
reference points and glimpses of everyday beauty that flow and swirl
and, over time, gather tremendous force.

The history of black San Francisco is folded in here as well, directly
and otherwise. The movie opens opposite the grandfather’s house with
a girl looking up at a man in a hazmat suit. She soon skips out of the
story, and while there are other references to pollution, you need to
dig on your own to know more about the neighborhood, Bayview-Hunters
Point
[[link removed]],
which sits on a peninsula in the San Francisco Bay. For decades, the
Navy maintained a shipyard there on which it studied radiation and
decontaminated ships exposed to atomic testing. The shipyard employed
thousands of African-Americans, and when it closed area unemployment
spiked.

“Last Black Man” belongs to a handful of recent Bay Area movies
about the African-American experience that
includes “Blindspotting”
[[link removed]] and “Sorry
to Bother You,”
[[link removed]] both
set in Oakland. In each, black characters confront (among other
things) gentrification, a polite word for what, in effect, is a form
of white colonization. Taken together, these movies pick up a thread
in Barry Jenkins’s wistful 2008 romance “Medicine for
Melancholy,” which tracks a young black man and woman through San
Francisco. The man hates the city, but also loves it. The hills, the
fog — it’s beautiful — and “you shouldn’t have to be upper
middle class to be part of that.”

In “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” the desire for home is
at once existential and literal, a matter of self and safety, being
and belonging. This is of course part of the story of being black in
the United States, which perhaps makes the movie sound like a dirge
when it’s more of a reverie. Or, rather, it’s both at once and
sometimes one and then the other. Much depends on Jimmie, who waxes
and wanes, sometimes rises and then falls in a city that — with this
ravishing movie — he insistently stakes a claim on, one indelible
image at a time.

THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO
Rated R. Running time: 2 hours.

 

 

* Film Review
[[link removed]]
* Film
[[link removed]]
* 'Last Black Man in San Francisco'
[[link removed]]
* Joe Talbot
[[link removed]]
* Jimmie Fails
[[link removed]]
* Jonathon Majors
[[link removed]]
* Danny Glove
[[link removed]]
* homelssness
[[link removed]]
* gentrifiction
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* San Francisco
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]