White Lies, Black Sheep at TIFF

Prior to show time I witnessing a few too many cineastes gasping and wheezing as they climbed the stairs inside Scotiabank Theatre’s cinema number three. Some cursed their friends for choosing seats above the first few rows. Halfway through their tour of duty, this festival must really be taking a toll on people. Those brave soldiers.

Then the movie started and the situation in that theatre grew even more dire.

White Lies, Black Sheep is the narrative follow up by James Spooner, the man behind Afro Punk, a well received documentary which is about exactly what it sounds like. White Lies purports to be about a black promoter in the white dominated punk scene, but what it is actually about is a black promoter in the white dominated hipster fashion plate douche bag scene. A scene that is as fashionable as it is notoriously vapid and borderline retarded.

In terms of style, Spooner sticks with what he knows, shooting in a documentary style. It’s a style that is pulled off well enough a viewer could mistake it for the real thing. . . save for a virtually all the performances. In his striving for authenticity Spooner populates his film with non-actors and For Realz scenesters. The problem with non-actors, however, is that they can’t fucking act. There are a lot of lines delivered with the authority one would expect from a grade school play. Another problem with the faux-doc style is that along with it comes an awful lot of tropes that will be familiar to anyone who happens to have caught a few student films in their time.

There are some interesting notes in White Lies, particularly in the banter of lead character AJ’s friends. They clearly fetishize him and have no idea that his role as the Novelty Black may bother him. They “don’t see colour.” The phrase stings the first time it is tossed off, but the words are shoehorned into the script so many times they lose their effect in a hurry. The dynamic between this circle of friends growing apart should feel tense, but with the number of dull remarks they deliver, most of these characters just come off as dunces who don’t know when to leave the party.

The range of the lead actor, Ayinde Howell, is all over the map. It seems he has skill in him and could hold his own around better talent. He has some good scenes, but he tends to emulate the skills of those around him, and all to often in this film that means he is acting opposite people with little ability.

Worse still, the final scene smacks a bit too much of a canned final act scene in American History X were the turned-good skinheads remove all the Nazi shit from their room. The close of White Lies finds AJ filling a garbage bag with all of his "white" junk: skinny jeans, rock albums, and posters featuring The Clash and The Who. It is a problematic closer, to say the least. I’m sure it is supposed to be problematic in some respect, but it is also a very weak and contrived shorthand to indicate a shift in thinking that is considerably more complex.

With the poor acting and clumsy characterization, I would submit that White Lies ends up being less about racial identity and more about outgrowing one’s shallow, idiot party friends. The ideas behind this film are worth exploring, certainly. Racial diversity within the lily-white rock scene is a world that is almost never seen on the screen. Unfortunately in this case the ideas were executed so poorly that this film is only a testament to wasted opportunity.

UPDATE: check out the Filmcatcher interview with the director James Spooner and lead Ayinde Howell here.

Aaron.
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Posted on 09/12/07 by: Aaron 10:33 PM

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