Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)

reviewed by
Serdar Yegulalp


                      SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAAD ASSSS SONG
                       A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
                        Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp

CAPSULE: Earthy, experimental, difficult, shockingly frank (even for 1997!), and ultimately refreshing story of a black man on the run from the cops.

The first few minutes of SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAAD ASSSSS SONG (yes, I checked -- that's the correct number of Ss) are without dialogue, just eerie montages of sounds. A young boy, obviously malnourished, is taken in and fed up by several loving mother-surrogate figures. Then one of them takes the boy to bed for a sexual initation (underneath the title credits) that's far more confrontatory and shocking than any ten BASIC INSTINCTs -- probably because it has the directness and clumsiness of real life, something we're not used to seeing on screen. This is one tough movie to swallow, no matter who you are, but that probably reflects more on how pallid and unchallenging movies have gotten lately. (I suspect the sex scenes in movies like EL TOPO and SALO would probably melt the synapses of most modern audiences.)

The plot is simple but not simpleminded. Sweetback, hassled by two white cops who are apparently just looking for an excuse to beat up on a black man, breaks his bonds and runs like hell. Along the way he moves through a good many of the kinds of environments that we are only just now being seen in a more serious light in the movies -- or at all, for that matter: the slums, the missions, the ghetto. In other, lesser, movies, Sweetback would be machine-gunning everything in sight and the end credits would roll over a pile of bodies; in this one, we get taken on a kind of a tour of the depressing and anarchic world that Sweetback takes for granted.

SSBAS first appeared in 1971 and was promptly rated X ("by an all-white jury", as director Melvin Van Peebles crowed in his legendary ad campaigns), and it's hardly surprising why. There's a good deal of sex in the movie, but it's handled in a way that's unsettlingly frank -- a frankness that spills over into the rest of the movie. In one scene, Sweetback visits a friend's house in the hope of getting sanctuary there, and the other man chats him up while on the toilet. We're not used to coming this close to people in real life, let alone in the movies -- especially not people who are not made out to be glamorous.

The movie is also full of experimental stylistics that are relatively unused today, but probably because of that seem curiously fresh and new in Van Peebles' hands. One scene, in which a man is interrogated by the cops, is loaded full of menacing energy as they fire off a gun inches from his ears, and suggest his deafness through a cleverly edited soundtrack. Another note: SSBAS is not so much anti-white (that would be too easy) as anti-authority, and as the movie goes on to demonstrate, authority exists in many forms -- governments, churches, and even the paranoid inside of one's own mind. SSBAS is ultimately about thirsting for freedom -- and it looks like we could use a little more of that in our movie diet, God knows.

Three and a half out of four Ss.
syegul@ix.netcom.com
EFNet IRC: GinRei http://serdar.home.ml.org another worldly device...

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