‘The African Desperate’ Review: Martine Syms’ Directorial Debut Is Full Of Insight & Vitality [NDNF]

Late on in “The African Desperate,” director Martine Syms cuts away from the narrative to a montage of bucolic upstate New York imagery: rolling green fields and farmland, charming B&Bs, and village shops. On the soundtrack, we hear audio from a viral clip of a Black man telling off his former coworkers, a fuming, embattled screed: “I quit, you can’t tell me nothing. Call the police, what they gon’ do? She racist as hell, Joe. She’s racist as hell. I see you bitch, every day. You a blue-eyed devil. Fucking racist bitch. I quit, y’all.”

If there seems to be a disconnect between sound and image, that’s very much the point: “The African Desperate” is concerned with the subjectivity of a Black artist in a predominantly white setting, and in the space between her frustrations, fear, and fury, and institutions and interactions that a white viewer might not perceive as particularly charged.

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Syms, an artist who has previously exhibited at the MoMA and elsewhere, previously directed a feature-length installation film, “Incense, Sweaters & Ice;” “The African Desperate” is her first narrative work, and draws on her own experiences across three summer semesters at Bard’s low-residency MFA program. Shot around Syms’ alma mater, it opens with Palace Bryant (Diamond Stingily) opening her studio for her final critique from an all-white panel of professors, and spans her last 24 hours upstate, in a place, Syms says in her director’s statement, where she “was one of a handful of students of color negotiating the dissonance of being lionized and attacked at the same damn time.”

The quickfire peer-review talk of the opening scene is funny, in a hyperspecific, insidery way, in its understanding of this world’s particular language of passive-aggression and pretention. It immediately establishes the ground rules for the film: Syms will rarely broaden the joke to get a laugh out of people who, say, haven’t heard of Fred Moten or Saidiya Hartman. Nor will she often resort to caricature in order to justify tension: there are racial microaggressions, deadening politeness and tone-deafness, but rarely outright confrontation; Palace’s angst generally seems to be motivated from elsewhere than the surface of a scene, and that distance is productive and interesting. We simply watch academia struggle to assimilate her references and imagine her interiority.

Despite her obvious intelligence, Palace is caught a bit flat-footed by the critique. Her work, though we see little of it, is apparently good: Later on in the film, it’s revealed that Palace, like Syms, has a major museum show upcoming soon after her graduation. She receives some professional advice from a seemingly more career-savvy, presumably less accomplished, naturally white classmate.

Stingily has a droll, raspy voice, good for conveying Palace’s deadpan humor and caution. She’s decked out memorably in a sundress and boots, with orange hair and a denim jacket that says “Dead Daughter” on the back—a reference to Stingily’s own London exhibition by that name. (In fact, Palace’s mother is just a phone call away, a constant reminder of the opposing, oppressive pulls of family obligation and creative ambition.) The film is steeped in its art-school milieu, getting the details right enough to draw out laughs, or at least smiles of pleasurable recognition. The students have the right names (Portia, Akin, “Hotjake”), wear the right outfits (a fencing laméas top over bike shorts, a Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness t-shirt, a wikipedia baseball cap), and make the right kind of art (when Palace side-eyes a found sculpture that’s basically small piles of stainless-steel chains, you can practically hear a curator droning on about “industrial society’s vernacular legacies of colonialism” or somesuch).

Palace and her (mostly white) classmates sometimes talk past each other, but context matters, and history, and to figure it out you have to be attentive and empathetic—you end up watching Stingily’s body language, more than listening to the inevitably vocal-fried dialogue, to see how relaxed or tense she is around different people. Palace’s fraught relationship with her peers is exemplified by the white art bro with whom she’s unable to consummate a hookup, despite their mutual attraction. Art school is like an extended summer camp, at least for Palace’s classmates: dropping by at people’s summer rentals or visiting their studios, driving out to the lake for a picnic or midnight dip. The whole movie has a punch-drunk last-day-of-school hangout vibe that manifests, in Palace, as restlessness, a feeling of being Done With This. As Syms says she did on her last day of art school, Palace makes a point of not wanting to go to the end-of-semester party, before finally relenting and then raging, in multiple senses.

The extended party sequence, over the course of which Palace ingests a prodigious cocktail of hallucinogens, takes up the second act of the film and drags a little bit. Syms, despite the freshness of her voice, struggles to find the appropriate flourishes to make her film more accessible; the late “I quit” montage mentioned above is one of her more effective shoestring-budgeted stylistic interventions, in a film that more often relies on swirling trippy colors and secondhand Zola-esque direct-to-camera narrative of text messages and quickfire picture-in-picture meme montages. Still, “The African Desperate” is the work of an artist who has moved fairly seamlessly from the gallery to the cinema and has more than enough vitality and insight to join the canon of films about the Black experience in higher education. [B]