The genre of films about filmmakers is both hackneyed and immensely stimulating. It places stringent demands on filmmakers because it foregrounds their ideas about their art along with their practice of it, and invites self-aggrandizement along with self-reflection. Merawi Gerimas first feature, Residue (which appeared on Netflix on Friday), is a notable new entry in the genre, because of the deeper, fuller grid of experience and history onto which it maps the protagonistsand Gerimas ownactivity, and because of the severe self-questioning that the movie modestly embodies. Its the story of a Black filmmaker who has been living in California and who returns to his home town of Washington, D.C., to make a film set in his former neighborhood. (Gerima, studied film at the University of Southern California before returning to D.C., where he grew up, to make Residue.)
Residue is a notable exception in part because it belongs to another genre, the prodigals returnmore specifically, the you-cant-go-home-again subgenreand, here, too, Gerimas vision is both intimate and broad, at once personal and societal and cinema-centric. The protagonist, Jarell (Obinna Nwachukwu), whom everyone calls Jay, arrives in his familys D.C. neighborhood after many years away and finds that things have changed. Jay, whos Black, sees the effects of gentrification at oncehe sees white people on streets where hed never seen any while growing up. Driving a white pickup truck, Jay reaches the apartment where hell be staying and gets hassled by a young white man, who threatens to call the police on him; he finds persistent real-estate agents and investors offering cashin person, on flyers, by phoneto Black residents, including his parents, for their homes. (His parentsplayed by Melody A. Tally and Ramon Thompsonare renting out a room to a young white man.)
Jay has come back to his old neighborhood in order to make a film about the people he knows there, about the Black community that hes from and thats dwindling, being dispersedseemingly being occupiedby an influx of wealthier white residents. Even before his arrival, hes haunted with doubts (expressed in voice-over) about the usefulness of his project; after he gets to town, he finds his plans, even his very presence, far more complicated than hed expected. Despite the warm welcome that he soon receivesfrom older men whod known him as a child, and from his childhood friends, especially Delonte (Dennis Lindsey), who hasnt left the neighborhood and has led a troubled lifeJay is taken as something of an outsider who doesnt know, who cant know, what things have been like for those he left behind and lost contact with. Whats more, hes viewed with suspicion, which is aroused primarily by his earnest, insistent questions about his former best friend, Demetrius, who isnt there and about whom nobodys very willing to talk. Is Jay intrusive? Insensitive? The police?
The movie is conceived with space in mind, and its prominent from the start; Gerima films with wide-screen images (the cinematographer is Mark Jeevaratnam) that are filled with city buildings and vistas and that, with canny framings and choice of lenses, either hold characters in those spaces or detach them from their surroundings. Far from merely telling the story of Jay and his neighborhood, Residue creates, for its characters and its setting, a distinctive cinematographic identity, one that unites the crafts of movies and reveals the unity of direction, editing, and dramaturgy. Its a subjective film that delves deep into Jays memories of growing up, by way of footage, from what looks like home videos and home movies, showing scenes of his childhoodhis friends, his family, the sense of community, and also the gang violence and police oppression that ravaged itand with inner voices and imagined events, too.
Gerimas storytelling, as Jay makes his way through his neighborhood and attempts to renew lost connections, has a similar fusion of the intensely particular and the fragmentary. Jay is sharing an apartment with his girlfriend, Blue (Taline Stewart), from whom hes seemingly been separated for a while, but the warmth and the intimacy of their relationship (also distinctively depicted) has no backstory attached to it. Neither, for that matter, does the over-all matter of Jays long-term absence; his seemingly slender contact with the community in which he was raised, including with his parents; and the general breakdown of the thread of local updates about family and friends. The effect is to render Jay a figure of poignant paradox. Hes an uprooted man whose memories are deep and strong, who works to honor the people who inhabit them, but whose sense of the present day is something of a tabula rasaand whose blanks of up-to-date knowledge are as much an inevitable part of whatever film hell make as they are an inevitable part of the failure that hes forced to confront.
While averting explanations of basic practicalities, Residue thrusts other specificsof the sort usually left out or overshadowed, from the periphery to the centerto the foreground. Jay learns that one longtime friend, Mike (Derron Scott), is newly released from prison and struggling with the lure of gang life, and that Delonte, unbeknownst to Jay, had endured horrors in childhood from which he still hasnt recovered. Yet, if theres something blank about the slate with which Jay arrives in town, theres a strong suggestion that its due to his own efforts at erasure, as seen in a remarkable, moving subplot involving another childhood friend named Dion (Jamal Graham), which nearly takes over the film and expands its purview into daringly expressive realms of fantasy while considering, with bitter directness, the calculatedly cruelty of the carceral system.
Jay returns home, to make his film, with a well-intentioned innocence thats revealed to him, in all its presumptuousness, in a series of scenes that also reflect Gerimas fierce cinematic imagination. A nighttime reunion with Delonte, from opposite sides of a chain-link fence, is punctuated by a visit from a local policeman, whos never seen but whose aggressive questioning is met by Jay and Delonte in drastically different ways, which suggest the mens drastically different places in the community and its presumptive pecking order. Delonte skeptically questions Jay about his plans for the movie, and reacts with quiet derision to Jays earnest answer: Just trying to give a voice to the voiceless, man. Delonte responds, derisively, Whos voiceless? Later, he offers a much more scathing view of Jays intentions and character, in a scene thats written, performed, and filmed with an awe-inspiring power.
Throughout, Jay witnesses a community thats being torn apart from within. The pressures of white supremacy from society at large have, in effect, moved in, and the aggressions and assumptions of new neighbors who are often anything but neighborly (and whose occasional attempts at being neighborly are equally dubious) are constant sources of inner tension and reckless provocation. Gun violence and gang violencethe self-destructive turmoil of a community thats isolated, deprived, and besiegedpersist. And, when Jay returns home, it isnt only his blanked-out consciousness that gets filled inits a seemingly suppressed rage thats only exacerbated by the revelation of his own inadequacy, artistic impotence, and emotional failures. Jay endures, subtly but critically, the destruction of his self-image, which, he discovers, was built on a void, and which is mirrored by the voiding, through gentrification, of the community on which his identity was founded. The furious and mind-wrenching tensions that Jay facesand that Gerima evokes as his ownare inseparable from those of his neighborhood, of the community at large, of American society over all. The failures built into a film such as the one that Jay plansand of which Gerima essentially accuses himselfarent those of filmmakers alone. Residue s subject is, inescapably, ongoing collective failures of an enormous, historical scope.read more
“Residue,” Reviewed: A Prodigal Filmmaker’s Wrenching Return
