Nickel Boys: Cinema as a Moral Issue (*****)

In A propos de Niza, his first film, Jean Vigo claimed the necessity, almost urgency, of the point of view. Cinema is probably nothing more than that, the correct choice of a place from which to look and, more importantly, next to whom to look. And that determines almost everything. It is, if you will, a moral choice. In the aforementioned documentary, Vigo portrayed the opulence of the bourgeoisie and his camera offered itself, in this first approach to the world, as a scalpel dedicated to dissecting with irony the exhibitionist soul of a perhaps blind society. Nickel Boys is a film entirely constructed from the point of view with the radicality that the director of L'Atalante demanded. And that detail, which is really a positioning on the side of the sufferer, makes it an essential and profoundly beautiful production. Aesthetics through ethics.

The entire film adopts the gaze of its protagonist. We see what he sees, we feel each of his passions, joys, sorrows and, of course, wounds. But far from being a more or less virtuous trick or a literary puzzle in the style of Perec, the idea is to reconstruct reality entirely from the constancy and need for, in fact, a point of view that gives it meaning. It is a demand motivated by the plot rather than a simple whim. The resource is not new. To go to the canonical example, Robert Montgomery tried something similar in 1946 in The Lady in the Lake. That was a film based on a text by Raymond Chandler that played on taking the rough atmosphere of the thriller to the extreme with the bitter limitation of a barely glimpsed mystery. And all so rigorous that only the mirrors revealed the face of the protagonist. Only when Robert Montgomery looked at himself, the spectator did the same... in Robert Montgomery's face.

RaMell Ross, previously the author of the dazzling non-fiction exercise Hale County This Morning, This Evening , adapts Colson Whitehead's novel of the same name. It tells one of those tremendous, brutal and unique stories that determine the history of an entire country. And they determine it, first by having been hidden for so long and, later, by the almost material impossibility (beyond all morality) of assimilating it, of understanding it, of forgiving it. For more than a century, the Florida Nickel Academy reformatory for black youth became a chamber of horrors where its inhabitants were systematically subjected to all kinds of sexual, mental and physical abuse. It was a true methodical and perfectly systematized extermination that turned the center into a true death factory. The film follows the lives of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). They are friends and share the pain of being alive at the Nickel. One trusts in the possibility of redemption, the other long ago abandoned all hope. And so on.

RaMell Ross places the camera, rather than just placing it, on Elwood's gaze. From time to time, Turner acts as a mirror. He changes the position, but, and this is the important thing, the point of view remains intact, perfect and transparent. Nickel Boys is conceived as an ode to everything that saves, to the last shred of life in the indisputable evidence of suffering, hatred, and the terrible. The entire effort of the film consists of something as basic as giving the spectator the illusion of looking through the eyes of the protagonist and even, as impossible as it is, being the protagonist himself. Without melodrama, without hollow exhibitionism, far from any attempt to make style prevail over pain, what remains is an essentially moral film, emotional to the point of desperation and, despite everything and against everything, beautiful. And all with the conviction that cinema, as Vigo would maintain, is either a point of view or it is not.

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Director : RaMell Ross. Starring : Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater. Duration : 140 minutes. Nationality : United States.