Chi-Raq review: Spike Lee arrives in Berlin with a loud message attached to his latest musical-comedy-drama…
Chi-Raq review by Paul Heat at the Berlin Film Festival, 2016. Chi-Raq appears at this year’s Berlinale Film Festival out of competition, a couple of months after a very limited US release in December, that was quickly followed by a DVD and Blu-Ray bow in January.
Chi-Raq is named after its lead protagonist, a foul-mouthed, gun-toting gangster rapper played by Nick Cannon, and also on the city in which is based, Chicago – nicknamed Chi-Raq after its infamous gun culture. The city is more of a war zone than its Middle-Eastern namesake, with official figures stating on press materials that between 2001 and 2015, 7,356 people have died on the streets of the city a result of gun violence. This is an emergency, Lee tells us with the large lettering plastered across the scene following the film’s opening number, performed by Cannon.
Billed as a ‘loose’ adaptation of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata, the film sees two rival gangs going up against each other on the tough streets of the South Side region of the city. The Trojans and the Spartans’ violence has led to the innocent ‘collateral damage’ killings of innocent bystanders, including children, and the woman of the city have had enough. A group of them, led by Lysistrata (the brilliant Teyonah Parris), the girlfriend of Chi-Raq, engage themselves in all-out woman-power, forcing a sex-strike across the city, a move that is made to ensure that their men give up the guns and put an end to the war and senseless killing on the streets. Before they know it, the girls have started a revolution with the movement not stopping at the city’s limits, but stretching beyond across the country, and indeed around the world.
With a superb cast that includes John Cusack, Angela Bassett, Wesley Snipes and a scene-stealing Samuel L. Jackson as our guide through the movie as Dolmedes, Lee has delivered a truly unique, if sometimes off-beat movie-going experience. It’s clear to see why this got a more limited release in the States, perhaps undeservedly so, and it has a strange feel to it. The lines of dialogue are either rapped, sung or delivered with rhyming monologues, something that takes a little getting used to, but is not off-putting.
Lee lambastes the gun control situation America, the film very much one with a message; if 7000 people have died on the streets of Chicago in just four years, compared to just over 3,500 killed in combat in Iraq, why has South Side not been declared a war zone. Why is this not on the agenda of the authorities? Why are they letting innocent victims die in a segregated area of America’s third most-populated city? To us it’s baffling, but to the residents of the city who are depicted, albeit with a slightly exaggerated form, it must be infuriating.
Political messages aside, Lee has firmly stamped his mark on this very unique, overwhelming feature which will very much divide audiences. A million miles away from his best work, but a film that is one his most necessary.
Chi-Raq review at the Berlin Film Festival, 2016.
Chi-Raq is awaiting a UK release.
