Berlin Film Festival 2016 – Chi-Raq, review

Chi-Raq the word (pronounced Shy-Rack) is a street-slang amalgam of Chicago and Iraq, used  for the strife-torn South Side of Chicago
Chi-Raq: Is this film is too much down with the evils it claims to tackle?
David Sexton18 February 2016

At Berlin, all the market talk is dominated by whether or not the streaming giants are demolishing the traditional methods of theatrical film production, sales and release. Not yet, seems to be the relieved verdict.

It's generally accepted that the comparative failure of Beasts of No Nation in the awards season was partly down to its release on Netflix. Chi-Raq, directed by Spike Lee, is the first production by Amazon Original Movies, given a limited theatrical release in the States in December to qualify for Oscars, and then given made available on Amazon Instant Video before turning up here at the Berlinale - and it is instructive to see some at least of the 1,931 customer reviews it has received on Amazon.com in the States, 38% of them one-stars, far from impressed.

Chi-Raq the word (pronounced Shy-Rack) is a street-slang amalgam of Chicago and Iraq, used for the strife-torn South Side of Chicago, a city where there were more murders than there were American deaths over the same years in the Iraq war, "committed by young black males against young black males - Heaven help us all", as a local pastor says in the opening sequence.

Chi-Raq the film, written by Spike Lee and Kevin Wilmott, is a rough adaptation of Aristophanes's comedy Lysistrata, first performed in Athens in 411 B.C., about one woman's mission to end the interminable Peloponnesian War by persuading the women of Greece to withhold sex from their husbands and lovers, in order to force them, through laughable sexual frustration, to negotiate peace. Like Lysistrata, Chi-Raq is written in verse - rapping rhymes, anyway. Instead of having a Greek chorus, it has a nattily dressed street poet Dolmedes, played by Samuel L Jackson, repeatedly cropping up to belt out pointed summaries of what is going down.

In this South Side, there are two rival gangs, wearing orange or purple, the Trojans and the Spartans.

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The Spartans' gang leader is called Chi-Raq himself, an aspirant rapper with a penchant for big guns, whose squeeze Lysistrata is played by small but mighty Teyonah Parris, who was Don Draper's secretary Dawn in Mad Men.

Heading the Trojans is one-eyed Cyclops (it's re-mix, what can I say?) played by Wesley Snipes with a glittering eye-patch and a very silly evil snigger.

After a shoot-up at one Chi-Raq's concerts, followed by a firebombing of his crib right when he's making out with her, Lysistrata has finally has had enough, after a local child has been accidentally shot dead in the street during a drive-by. With the help of a wise and bookish older neighbour, Miss Helen (Angela Bassett), Lysistrata begins to organize a women's revolt ("we all sisters here!"), under the slogan: "No peace, no pussy!" Later this is refined into "No peace, no piece".

Lysistrata rhymes it: "We gonna make the Fools put down da Guns. Stop thinkin’ this Craziness is Fun!!! Your Women understand Life is more than polishin’ your Knobs. Saving Lives is our Job!!! It’s ‘bout breakin’ Strife, givin’ da Hood da True Meaning of Life!!!"

There's a long impassioned scene at the funeral service of the murdered girl. Playing the equivalent to the real life local activist, white Catholic priest Father Michael Pfleger, who helped Spike Lee meet local people in the area of the South Side where he made the film - John Cusack makes an emotive speech about how gun crime has got to stop, pointing the finger at the NRA, saying local people need good schools and jobs and an end to poverty. "We will not allow this self-inflicted genocide to continue!" he promises. The congregation roars its approval.

Other factors playing into gang life, including perhaps the very rap culture and abusive language the film embraces, and the broken families that exist alongside the hypersexualisation it celebrates, are not raised, ever. The film degenerates into a literal song and dance act, a rap musical, weirdly, given the grave subject matter, a jolly pantomime, almost an am-dram fest at points, quite cartoonish, especially in scenes of crude anti-white farce with a sexualy duped racist stripped to his underpants straddling a Civil War canon and whistling Dixie.

The sex-stike ends only after three months, when the entire world has been affected and similar movements have spread to cities everywhere - "world leaders are in crisis - the infrastructure is collapsing". There's a "sex-off", fully as grotesque as the "walk-off" in Zoolander, between Lysistrata and Chi-Raq, as to who can make the other come first in a public display.

Throughout, the women, even when withholding their favours, wear tiny costumes, like Beyonce, shaking their booties, dancing and parading, for audience-pleasing purposes perhaps. Throughout, the rhyming is crass beyond quoting, the language full of ho's and bitches, snatches, poontang, motherfuckers and niggas. There is no story, beyond this simplest stand-off set up, no character development, no sign of any other life.

And there's the simplest opposition between women (good, wanting peace and lives for their children) and men (violent, sex-mad, boastful - "how could dem females give up da long dick and da down stroke?" - and infantile). So it could be that Chi-Raq plays up to the worst stereotypes of African-American life, as some of those dismissive Amazon commenters claim - but who's to say?

Spike Lee did to his credit, leave Brooklyn and go and make this film in "E-Dub", Englewood, a three-mile block of Chicago's South Side.

Obviously, the solution to gangster life, gun crime and deprivation found in the film - there's a last minute mass reconciliation and repentance - has no reality whatsoever.

But, says Spike Lee, "if I’m in command of my skills as a filmmaker, it’s going to start people talking and bring light to the darkness. That is the goal of this film. And if we do that, we will save lives." Maybe. Or maybe this film is too much down with the evils it claims to tackle.

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