The film industry battle between Netflix and advocates of traditional cinema distribution was a sore point for much of last year, and still the fighting continues. The streaming giant recently confirmed that its conflict with the Cannes film festival remains unresolved: no Netflix films will play on the Croisette next month. Over in Hollywood, meanwhile, a Steven Spielberg-headed campaign to ban Netflix releases from future Oscars contention (Roma may have lost best picture, but its near miss still unnerved the Tinseltown establishment) has run into sticky legal territory, with the US department of justice, no less, weighing in to warn the Academy that such a move may violate antitrust law.
Among those opposing Spielberg on this matter is Ava DuVernay, who knows the value of Netflix for independent film-makers better than most. Her excellent, Oscar-nominated documentary 13th was released on the platform; her forthcoming miniseries based on the Central Park Five rape case will be too. But DuVernay’s investment goes beyond self-interest. It’s thanks to her backing that the entirely dazzling Ghanaian film The Burial of Kojo got a Netflix release earlier this month – and you’d be hard pressed to find a better example of the kind of cinema for which online distribution opens up unprecedented possibilities.
African cinema still gets the shortest shrift of all in UK cinemas: many otherwise adventurous arthouse labels would regard a Twi-language Afro-surrealist fable as a commercial non-starter, even for a DVD release. But this debut feature by Blitz Bazawule, a Ghanaian musician turned film-maker now based in New York, is as intoxicatingly cinematic a vision as we’ve yet seen on any size screen this year. A heady stew of child’s-eye bildungsroman, folklore and crow-dark fairytale quest, The Burial of Kojo nods to film-makers such as Djibril Diop Mambéty and Alain Gomis while experimenting with its own saturated paintbox. You can see why DuVernay was knocked sideways, picking it up for her distribution company, Array, despite no prominent film festival launch. (In the US, it’s getting a tiny cinema run alongside its Netflix release; UK viewers have only the latter option.)
The story – a rumbling family saga in which a young girl bears the weight of conflict between her father and uncle in rural Ghana – is lean but has the muscle of modern myth. Bazawule’s go-for-broke sensory language is what fleshes it out, with rich imagery of birds, water, smoke and fire shuffling our young heroine between physical and interior realms, and the director’s own Afrobeat-inflected score filling our heads.
It makes an unlikely but exhilarating double bill with another psychologically elastic stunner that is skipping cinemas, this time landing on Mubi’s curated playlist: Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s Fugue. A surprising, wind-slapped twist on the hoary old amnesia melodrama, Fugue was one of the sidebar standouts of last year’s Cannes fest, though it got shunted aside by many critics and buyers for not being as grandly eccentric as Smoczynska’s previous film, the punky modern mermaid tale The Lure.
That was fun, but this is the greater achievement. Following the mental splintering of a young wife and mother – quite astonishingly played by Gabriela Muskala – as she returns to a family she doesn’t remember after a two-year disappearance she can’t explain, it counters its tall-story mystery with interior detail of exquisitely magnified realism and sporadic, blossoming surges of fantasy. It lingers under the skin like a recurring shiver. Fugue, like The Burial of Kojo, is the kind of oddly shaped item that doesn’t fit easily into the big-screen market. Both films, however, are as vivid, big-thinking and dream-inspiring as any Spielberg blockbuster, whatever red lines he and the old guard wish to draw around what constitutes real cinema and where to find it.
New to streaming & DVD this week
Mary Poppins Returns
(Disney, U)
So much care and craft has gone into this belated sequel to the 1964 family classic that it feels churlish to call it a bit of a stiff – but Rob Marshall’s film feels like a lavish, perky performance of joy rather than the real thing.
Sorry to Bother You
(Universal, 15)
The first film by rapper-activist Boots Riley is all over the place in the right kind of way: a delirious, absurdist satirical fantasy that teems with storytelling invention, pop energy and political fury in equal measure.
Sink Or Swim
(StudioCanal, 15)
A major, Cannes-approved hit in France, this goofy male-crisis comedy has less appeal away from home. Think The Full Monty but with synchronised swimming. At least Mathieu Amalric classes it up a bit.
One, Two, Three
(Eureka, U)
Never as beloved as the cast-iron Billy Wilder classics (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment) that it followed, the director’s frenetic 1961 cold war satire shouldn’t be cast aside: a political time capsule that’s also briskly funny on its own terms.
