The African Desperate
After this long trawl, i'm desperate for a shower
dir: Martine Syms
2022
Watching this flick made during the covid era set and filmed at a liberal arts college in upstate New York, the painfully obvious fact hit me that it’s impossible to satirise this setting. It’s beyond satire. Everything that comes out of these people’s mouths sounds like they’re taking the piss.
The first ten minutes of the film involve our main character, being Palace Bryant (Diamond Stingily) having to defend her dissertation for her masters in fine arts. The words that pour forth from the mouths of these people sound like an alien tongue spoken by a species who delight in obscuring all meaning in what they say.
Even though it seems like a strange ritual for its own sake, Palace passes, and has completed her MFA. And that’s it in terms of her academic career, apparently. We spend pretty much 24 hours with Palace as she fends off the urgings of her friends to attend a graduation party that night, that she’s meant to be DJing at.
The whole point of the flick would be obvious if I’d mentioned it earlier: it’s not a film about what it was like to finish an MFA from Bard: it’s about what it was like for an African-American artist to attend school at a so-called bastion of liberalism, only to find out they’re just as racist as the Republican Party.
Yee haw. Palace herself seems to barge through life with few fucks given, but the aggressions, both micro and macro, of people who think they’re “allies”, take a toll on her. She is over being at this school (I have no idea what her work is actually like, other than some brief glimpses at the start of some stuff she threw together her work as a sculptor is referenced but not shown), and over being as a fetishized object even by people who are friendly to her.
This sounds more serious that it actually is, because when I say the film covers a day in the life of…, it mostly consists of Palace having conversations with other young people in the barely comprehensible dialect of the youngs, and mostly being plied with drugs. So many drugs! Palace and the people around her take recreational drugs from pretty much 10 minutes after the film starts until virtually the end.
It's meant to be fun, I guess.