Night of the Kings (2020)

Minor spoiler - the chicken lives! - Night of the Kings review by WS

In the basement of a dark and labyrinthine prison, to which he has been sent for an as yet unspecified crime, the new arrival – or “Roman” – is instructed to mount a podium and tell a story that will last until dawn, and told that failure will mean certain death. The Roman’s tale - an account of the life and career of a gang leader known as the Zama King - is blatantly fictionalised, beginning in what appears to be pre-colonial West Africa and containing other impossible elements such as a duel between two sorcerers, but in its later chapters it moves to present-day Abidjan and is interwoven with the country’s political upheavals circa 2010. His fellow inmates, who presumably want the Roman to believe that the threat of execution is real, but don’t want to have to kill him because that would deprive them of their only source of entertainment, help him out, embellishing his performance with close-harmony singing and interpretative dance. The story-within-story is brought to life on screen in a way that draws upon a number of genres and cinematic styles – costume drama, epic, fantasy, neorealism and newsreel footage.

The jail scenes are very atmospheric and menacing, and I was highly impressed by the production design, camerawork, and Kone's performance as the reluctant raconteur. We normally think of the dominant mood in prisons as being one of fatalism and apathy, but here it is one of suppressed energy and lust for life, and we get a striking contrast between the boisterous effervescence of the other inmates and the Roman’s apparent naivety and vulnerability. The writer and director deliberately take a non-realistic approach, steering clear of prison drama clichés, and adding some slightly kooky touches, such as an unexplained white man in the otherwise all-black jail who goes around with a pet hen on his shoulder.

One arguable shortcoming is that the narrative is too fragmented, with excessive cutting between present and past. Whilst this does serve to dissipate tension somewhat, I feel it is artistically justified. For these men, *everything* is fragmented, incomplete and makeshift. The chopping-up of the narrative reflects the way their own lives have been chopped up by poverty, violence and incarceration - or at least that’s my take on it. Another possible criticism is that the concurrent plot thread, that of Blackbeard’s associates and rivals jostling to become the new prison godfather, isn’t very dramatic, since Blackbeard is dying anyway and there’s no obvious reason why we should care who becomes the new boss. Again, this may be an allegory for Ivorian politics, in which I’m not well versed.

But this is still one of the most ambitious and original films a year, although what you take from it is up to you. For me, it's a celebration of creativity and art as something that naturally belong to the working class not the elites, an exploration of how we use myths and stories to compensate for our lack of power in the real world. It could even be viewed as an interrogation of our own relationship with truth. It is easy to sneer at someone for trying to reinvent a two-bit street hoodlum as a legendary warrior - or "king" - but if we’re honest, we ourselves don’t always want the unvarnished actualité as much as we think we do.