Born on the bayou, dumped onto home video: Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist

Dave Robicheaux is a lawman in the town of New Iberia, Louisiana. In the Electric Mist finds him investigating multiple homicides, most committed within weeks of the discovery of the victim’s remains, but one of them, the one no one cares about, goes back over 40 years. If a few freshly mutilated prostitutes prompt a certain apathy among the locals, a decades-old case of “nigger troubles” barely elicits a shrug. But every one of these deaths means something to Dave, and something tells him that the crimes of New Iberia’s past may not be so disparate from its present. The bayou functions here a forensic palimpsest, where clues that pertain to one death can be read amidst the traces of another. Every death in this film is connected to every other, and there is the sense that these surroundings, fecund both in vegetation and irrepressible memories, conspire to aid Dave in his pursuit of justice.

I imagine the role of landscape, place and history in this story was one of the things that most attracted French director Bertrand Tavernier, for whom this is the first American film since 1986’s ’Round Midnight. Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski, who also adapted Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s novel The Pledge for Sean Penn’s underrated 2001 film, wrote this adaptation of In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, the 1993 novel by James Lee Burke, who has a home in New Iberia and, like most good mystery writers, has made the evocation of place a pivotal element in his fiction. Tavernier’s film takes place after Hurricane Katrina, so Burke’s emphasis on the elements is only heightened by the lingering wreckage glimpsed during Dave’s commutes between New Iberia and New Orleans.

Dave is played by Tommy Lee Jones, who brings his inimitable dour authority to this tough-ass recovering alcoholic with well-oiled investigative instincts and few reservations when it comes to incorporating a little tire-slashing, police brutality or planting of evidence into his practice. The supporting roles have been taken up by a cast of equally impressive pedigree, with Mary Steenburgen as Dave’s wife; John Goodman as the wonderfully monikered “Baby Feet,” a swampland gangster branching out into movie producing; Peter Sarsgaard as a movie star on the verge of a meltdown and Kelly MacDonald as his very patient girlfriend; Ned Beatty in his stock role of the embodiment of fat, aged and affluent corruption; real-life bluesman Buddy Guy as a local sage and kick-ass guitar player and real-life filmmaker John Sayles as the bitter director of a Civil War drama; and The Band’s Levon Helm as General John Bell Hood of the Texas Cavalry. If that last character’s title reads as incongruous to the setting of this contemporary thriller, that’s because Dave, after having unwittingly drank some Dr. Pepper spiked with acid, starts to receive council from phantom Civil War vets. The dead, he explains, “can hover on the edge of our vision with the density and luminosity of mist, and their claim on the earth can be legitimate and tenacious as our own.”

Dave doesn’t talk like that in casual conversation. His musings on the spiritual realm are reserved for In the Electric Mist’s rather literary-sounding voice-over, which, while echoing Jones’ far more essential flights of disembodied philosophizing in No Country For Old Men, is one of the film’s weak points. To get an idea of just how superfluous this voice-over is you only need to watch the very first scene, where Dave sits at a bar, stares down into a glass of whiskey, then gets up and walks away. His voice-over tells us that he’s an alcoholic and is often tempted to drink, but never does—all of which is made obvious by the very well-framed and performed scene. But I suspect the voice-over may have been tacked on as someone’s idea of a rescue effort, though in the end nothing rescued this film from obscurity. In the Electric Mist screened in a slightly longer version this past February in Berlin before going directly to video. I’d like to say it’s shocking that this pretty sharp little bayou thriller brimming with such a wealth of name talent went straight to video, but these days, when a lion’s share of many critics’ yearly top ten lists feature movies most people never even get to see, nothing’s all that shocking anymore.

Tavernier is no stranger to the American South, or even to American crime fiction. Solid and recommendable as In the Electric Mist is, it’s a far cry from Coup de torchon, Tavernier’s absolutely brilliant 1981 adaptation of Jim Thompson’s deliciously sordid 1964 novel Pop. 1280, which follows the infernal trajectory of a seemingly bovine but secretly sociopathic small town sheriff. Tavernier’s blackly comic and inspired re-envisioning shifts the action from the West Texas to 1930s French West Africa and shines a dazzlingly fresh light on the story’s colonialist undercurrents. It also features masterful performances from Isabelle Huppert and the late, great Philippe Noiret. Criterion put it out on DVD some years back and it is very much worth seeking out.

In the neighbourhood: John Sayles and Maggie Renzi on Honeydripper, sense of place, and not moving to Canada

John Sayles has made 19 features over the last three decades and he’s made them the hard way, which in most cases is hopefully also the fun way, the way of unexpected inspiration, and of richer rewards. Sayles’ method of filmmaking strips the cloudiness and the confusion away from the term ‘independent.” His films are genuinely built from the ground up. Sometimes they’re sublime, sometimes they don’t entirely work, but they’re always the real thing.

Sayles and his producer Maggie Renzi have already spent months on the road, going from one community to another, promoting Honeydripper, a drama set in Harmony, Alabama in 1950, where, amidst news from Korea and perpetual tensions between the white and black side of the tracks, rhythm and blues is about to plug in and rock and roll about to spill forth, sputtering its first earthly breaths. I spoke with Sayles and Renzi—an inspiring, imminently down-to-earth couple who’ve stuck it out as partners and collaborators for more than 30 years—during their stop in Toronto. Renzi emphasized just how much they were depending on Honeydripper’s success to keep their spirits up and keep them making movies in an increasingly difficult climate.

“It was in 2004, right after Silver City was released and died a miserable death,” Renzi explains. “George Bush was back in for another four years. It was really a terrible low point for both of us and many of our countrymen. And instead of just saying, that’s it, we’re not making any more movies, let’s move to Canada, John said, ‘I have this idea about a guy who runs a club in the South in the 50s, and he does anything he needs to do to save his club, and that means he’s got to move along.’ And I thought, he hasn’t given up. It’s a great thing to make a movie about a middle-aged man moving along when you could be just brought to your knees, which is pretty well where we were.”

The character in question is Tyrone Purvis, whose place of business—the Honeydripper music club of the title—is on its last legs. He’s in debt. He can’t get liquor. The club across the way is draining Tyrone’s clientele with a louder, much cheaper source of entertainment called the jukebox. He’s about to be forcibly taken over by some moneymen and the local, lazy, racist white sheriff isn’t about to help him out. His daughter is sick and his wife is fed up… Sounds like a blues song, doesn’t it?

Tyrone still has a few good musicians at his disposal, including himself on piano, but their sound is rapidly becoming antique. Desperation pushes him to pour whatever funds he can raise into bringing in Guitar Sam, some dude in a flashy suit who plays some kinda amplified guitar. Tyrone’s hubris is his integrity, yet he’s not above trickery and theft to keep going. And there’s some story about his past that no one talks about, one that puts him in a very sinister light. It is among the film’s greatest strengths that Tyrone is played by Danny Glover, who wrangles all of these contradictions into a single living portrait of a no-longer-young man at the crossroads.

“The genesis of the story really comes out of the music,” Sayles explains, “from me growing up in the 50s, listening to top 40 rock and roll radio, which was pretty good, but then slowly finding my way to blues and gospel, which made me work backwards. I realized that rock and roll came from some place. The driving question in this is when did these disparate threads turn into rock and roll and why, which got me to researching the history of the first electric guitar. I started to think what that must have done to the music. Life was getting noisier and faster, so the music was going to change.”

Honeydripper’s other central protagonist is Sonny Blake, a radio repairman in the war who read an article about Les Paul in Popular Electronics and decided to make his own electric guitar. Sonny is riding to rails to nowhere in particular when he finds himself in Harmony and meets Tyrone—and his lovely daughter—just before getting sentenced to picking cotton for the county for doing nothing in the wrong place. As very charming as it often is, Honeydripper is decidedly not a story of great suspense, so I’m not ruining much by telling you that fate will slowly conspire so that young Sonny and his newfangled contraption will eventually ally themselves with Tyrone and his club.

Sayles attempts to wed myth and archetype—ie: the spooky mystical blind guitar-playing oracle played by Keb Mo, or Mary Steenburgen’s pickled belle—to naturalism is at times awkward, and his immersion in the Southern black vernacular makes for some strained, stagey-sounding dialogue (though Glover’s monologue about the first African-American to dare to tinkle on his master’s piano is absolutely riveting). But, besides the performances, and, of course, the music, what keeps Honeydripper compelling is how thoroughly it’s rooted in culture, place and people. As with many of Sayles films, it is the loving attention to detail, the heartfelt investment in ordinary lives being lived against the broader backdrop of history, that distinguishes the work and imbues it with sufficient vivacity.

“In other films,” explains Renzi, “so often there’s no real setting, no real time, no real sense of geography. The history of the place doesn’t figure into the story. Whereas what John does is take you right into that neighbourhood, lets you walk around, and the story grows out of that. Otherwise Honeydripper’s a pretty girl and a guy who plays a guitar—an Elvis movie, basically.” Both Sayles and Renzi have a good chuckle at this. Needless to say, Honeydripper’s all-black—and unanimously gifted—cast also gives it a little something extra you don’t find in Elvis movies.

“It’s been fun touring with this movie,” Renzi says, “seeing how warmly audiences, especially Southern and African-American audiences, have responded to it, and seeing their affection for John’s work in general. The people we’ve shown it to, they all want to tell you about this one movie that was so important to them. Often it’s Matewan, sometimes City of Hope or Eight Men Out. But it does seem like in nearly every case what people respond to are the particulars.”

Charles Burnett on Killer of Sheep

One of the most simultaneously acclaimed and unseen works in American movies, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep is finally making its proper theatrical debut 30 years after its completion. Its scarcity was partially due to licensing difficulties resulting from the film’s expressive use of music from the likes of Paul Robeson, Rachmaninoff and Dinah Washington, whose rendition of ‘This Bitter Earth’ supplies the emotional clincher for two of the film’s most memorable, stark and heartbreaking scenes.

Not that Burnett needed any assistance with regards to the film’s lyricism. Set within the crumbling buildings, dusty rail yards and rundown homes of Watts, Los Angeles, Burnett’s images of children roof jumping, wearing masks or playing with rocks, families assembling on front stoops, and its protagonist, Stan, accumulating work hours in an abattoir are imbued with an aching visual poetry –not to mention a terrifically funky sense of humour. These two elements frequently conspire to provide the film with its most pointed moments, such as the scene where Stan explains why he doesn’t consider himself poor. “I give things to the Salvation Army sometimes,” he says.

Stan’s occupation also forms a poetic, if dire, link with his private disorders: Stan’s an insomniac, thus he not only kills sheep but counts them, too. His wife craves his affection desperately, but he’s a million miles away. When not working, Stan throws himself into less emotionally demanding projects, such as acquiring a motor for a friend’s jalopy, a mission doomed to comic failure. The closest thing to conventional heroism on display here is simply Stan and his wife’s ability to endure an existence that promises precious few opportunities at advancement with their humanity in tact.

Social context aside, the singular, striking images of Killer of Sheep seem informed by the photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. And these images have gone on to deeply influence other films, most notably David Gordon Green’s George Washington. Burnett himself seems perpetually surprised by his film’s impact however, claiming that he never intended it to be seen outside of activist or social science screenings. His family moved to Watts when Burnett was just entering kindergarten, and he felt that Killer of Sheep was basically just a reflection on where he was from. He spoke to with me from his current home in a different section of Los Angeles.

JB: I heard you first studied electronics.

Charles Burnett: Yeah, I was thinking about becoming an engineer. But I started looking at other people who were going into it, listening to their comments and jokes, what they expected out of life. It just didn’t seem interesting to me. Their jokes weren’t funny. They were looking forward to job security, buying a Winnebago, all that junk. That didn’t sound too inviting.

JB: Was being a filmmaker too far out a notion for you then?

CB: It was more a matter of my not being aware of it. When I was a kid I always wanted to do something with a camera, but had no clear ideas. Then I went into electronics, got disenchanted with that. Then I started going to movies a lot, and wondering how you make these things. And I discovered UCLA’s program, which was dirt-cheap at the time.

JB: How was your experience at UCLA?

CB: It was a chance for discovery. I remember taking this documentary class with Basil Wright that was very instrumental in my deciding which way to go.

JB: In the sense that you saw the documentary elements within fiction films?

CB: It was more that when people would talk about fiction films, you never heard them talk about the importance of treating the subject in a human way. Being honest and respectful, that kinda stuff. It made me look at films differently.

JB: Did you always intend to make a film about race, class and community?

CB: Well, I was certainly aware of race, being from Mississippi. And L.A. was worse somehow, divided and Apartheid-like in many ways. In my neighbourhood two or three of us couldn’t walk down the street together without being harassed, being sent to jail for the least thing. They wouldn’t give you a chance. Lots of kids thought it was funny going to jail, a rite of passage. So I think that my social conscience just came from growing up in that environment.

JB: It’s interesting to consider Killer of Sheep in the context of its period, particularly how it contrasts the blaxploitation films popular then.

CB: Many of us were getting into film to create our own narratives, to counter what Hollywood offered. So when these blaxploitation films came, initially they were exciting simply because a black person was the centre of attention. The negative side became apparent later on. But my thing was trying to reflect a situation where the audience would be able to ask themselves how they might help these people. And I didn’t want to romanticize things with regard to the working class.

JB: Did the story come to you in an ordered way?

CB: It did actually. But I wanted it based in the day to day. There’s no single thread that moves it, just the things that happen as you continue trying to eke out a life.

JB: Music is unusually vital in Killer of Sheep. Did you have a precise idea how the music would interact with your images?

CB: Yeah. A lot of it is blues, music I grew up with. I associate it with that environment. And with blues you have to grow up to really understand it. I had the good fortune to speak with August Wilson many years before he died, and he was saying how these same songs somehow generated images for his plays. That’s how it worked for me.

JB: Looking back after 30 years, how has Killer of Sheep changed for you?

CB: Seeing it now just makes me think how the neighbourhood’s changed. It was a much better life back then, before crack hit. People could still own their homes. There was a sense of community. Parents these days don’t want their kids going out for fear they might get shot. Back then kids could go anywhere. People used to say that if you wanted to better yourself just get a high school diploma. Now they’ll just tell you to get up and get away from here.

JB: Are the things that were important to you when you made Killer of Sheep still important to you now?

CB: I think the core is still there, the whole idea of why I got into film in the first place. The problem’s just that you can’t do the film you want to. With money comes however many compromises, and you need to constantly put things in terms that money people understand.

JB: Any chance this new wave of acclaim for Killer of Sheep might help you do what you want?

CB: Nah. People want films to make money. Folks’ll just look at me as an art film person. And art can be a dirty word in this business.