The Male Experience

Three Dancing Slaves

Directed by Gael Morel

Four Brothers

Directed by John Singleton

What's interesting about John Singleton's Four Brothers is also what ruins it: Four young men of contrasting temperaments who grew up as foster brothers in Detroit (Mark Wahlberg as Bobby, Tyrese Gibson as Angel, Andre Benjamin as Jeremiah and Garrett Hedlund as Jack) reveal their kinship-one that transcends blood-when they become vigilantes and go after the thug who killed their foster mother. Although this premise is based on the 1965 John Wayne western The Sons of Katie Elder, Singleton's hiphop-era update actually feels closer to The Little Rascals. Its subtext is about the "family" that hiphop has made of black and white Americans-youths of different ethnic backgrounds who are galvanized by the culture of violence, machismo and death. There's good potential here, but Singleton never fulfills it because he panders to the worst tastes of that multiculti, pop-hardened audience-settling for blaxploitation-style sensationalism.

By lucky coincidence, what Four Brothers could have been is boldly demonstrated in the new French film Three Dancing Slaves. It's also about brothers, three young Frenchmen grieving their mother's recent death, but its "All Men Are Brothers" theme encompasses a radical gay proposition. Director-writer Gael Morel approaches cinema more personally than Singleton. He shows up the embarrassing difference between Hollywood and art filmmaking and exposes why the hiphop movement has produced so few good movies.

What a filmmaker like Singleton takes to be a sincere approach-a Thanksgiving dinner sequence where the boys poignantly recall their mom's admonitions-is little more than formula and cliche. Perhaps the worst scene in Four Brothers shows the bereft young men watching a surveillance-camera videotape of their "mother" being gunned down in a corner store. Only after many years of insensitive Hollywood tripe could one perpetuate this tasteless, unlikely narrative contrivance. Singleton can't tell the difference between genre and lies. By hooking up modern experience with Hollywood convention, he may think he has validated the sorrow of ghetto boys and hiphop wannabes. But Four Brothers stays on the surface of contemporary male experience.

Parts of Four Brothers were actually shot on the desolate streets of Detroit (as grim and barren as war-torn Rome in Italian Neorealist films; as fictitiously ominous as the wintry streets in this year's Detroit-set remake of Assault on Precinct 13), but it is totally without sensibility and nuance. Singleton depicts the town's race relations by rote-rewinding 8 Mile, even muffling the tension between Detroit locals and recent Arab-immigrant shopowners. He uses these times without exploring them believably. It's the same condescension found in topical rap records that lack political conviction and offer little rhythmic invention.

Amazingly, Morel understands cinema the way the best musicians understand hiphop: He knows it's not the story that matters but the beat, the heat, the emotional effect. Scene after scene in Three Dancing Slaves is so visually arresting, the spatial relations between the actors so erotically attuned, that the "story" enters your consciousness second. It's dizzying, whereas Four Brothers is all story, all gimmick. Three Dancing Slaves is primarily an esthetic, erotic experience: a vibrant, throbbing, captivating look at the way a family of boys co-exists. Marc (Nicholas Cazale) is a skinhead hellraiser into gangs and drug-selling. Christophe (Stephane Rideau) finishes his jail term then joins the cutthroat labor market. Olivier (Thomas Dumerchez) idolizes his older siblings and attempts to figure out his own identity.

It's almost an Ozu family epic. Each brother's story is seasonally titled: Marc-Summer. Christophe-Winter to Spring. Olivier-Early Autumn. The sequence of events is clear, but the connections are tangential. They don't look alike, they're just differently hot-brothers under the skin. And there's a fourth "brother"-Hicham (Salim Kechiouche), a dusky, curly-haired North African descendant who practices capoeira, hangs with Marc's gang and conducts a secret affair with young Olivier. Hicham's "difference" aces the racial issue that Singleton sentimentalizes. Seeking to convey the spiritual substance of brotherhood, Morel, unlike Singleton with his sham hiphop unity, innovates newly authentic storytelling.

Morel's movie, originally titled The Clan, won an honorable mention at the recent New Fest, the annual New York festival of gay and lesbian films. (Apparently not even that venue quite knew how to judge Morel's audacity.) Despite gay-friendly network-tv and hiphop class mixing, most pop culture adheres to boring social conventions. Pretend transgressors like Gus Van Sant and Larry Clark never admit their beefcake attraction; they're just dirty old men with trendy, peekaboo camera technique. But Morel's filmmaking is startlingly open-and as arty as Cocteau or Genet. He feels as free to boy-watch as Wong Kar Wai does to girl-watch. The film opens with Hicham running, jostling a noticeable basket. The first glimpse of Marc adores his shirtless, sinewy, Y-shaped torso, seen from the back. Later, Morel does a series of cuts between Marc and his favorite animals-a horse, even his dog. Morel is entranced by feral masculinity. First time I saw the film, there was a spacey, distended blur whenever men passed each other, recalling Neil Jordan's editing pulse in The Good Thief.

Compare that to the very traditional-and unimaginative-filmmaking in Four Brothers. Singleton captures his quartet's rapport. (The constant gay baiting between Bobby and Jack suggests a special intimacy.) But his trade of old-western vigilantism for modern-day urban ethics is unacceptable. The missing critique of alpha-male romanticism is exactly what Morel applies to make Three Dancing Slaves so scintillating. (Singleton features gunplay; Morel features orgasm.) Morel understands what even his straight French brothers are in thrall to. He revels in this culture as Damon Dash savors thuggery in State Property II. Both films portray male-bonding ecstasy, but Morel-unlike Singleton and more consciously than Dash-dares to read between the lines: When Marc's gang watches porn, he gets busy with a tranny in another room; another boy in camo pants sits in a corner watching. It's matter-of-fact brazenness but also a credible cultural detail.

Funny how Singleton centers on Wahlberg's white hot-shot Bobby, while Morel dares to use the displaced Arab Hicham as his movie's center (and narrator). Three Dancing Slaves' unusual plot resembles the politicized Faulknerian plot structures used by Morel's mentor Andre Techine. (Morel debuted as an actor in Techine's 1984 Wild Reeds and repeats that film's motorcycle/love scene during Hicham and Olivier's powerful, tender idyll.) Four Brothers can be dismissed or tolerated as boilerplate, but Three Dancing Slaves exudes the sound and fury of coming to terms with maleness. Morel proves that no one obsesses over manhood like a gay guy, and this is his way of exploring the sexual identity hiphop culture gainsays except to cite received macho ideology. The year's most irreducible movie image shows Marc, Christophe and Olivier sleeping nude, their limbs and phalluses entwined, as their father looks on. Whatever it means (I attempt fuller explanation of sexual art in Wellspring's DVD of Sokura's Father and Son) it makes for the sexiest mainstream gay movie ever. To quote a Faulkner scholar, Morel's film has the momentum of exuberant experiment.