Neptune Frost: Anti-Colonial, Gender-Fluid Political Rave Up Boasts Triumphant Imagery
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B plus
Political performance art doesn’t typically the get the kind of buzz that the film Neptune Frost has enjoyed on the festival circuit over the past year. Honestly, a good part of that is because it looks so good.
Billed as an “Afro-futurist science-fiction musical fantasy,” the film is co-directed by American slam poet and multi-media artist Saul Williams and Rwanda filmmaker Anisia Uzeyman.
Their political message is as urgent as an amber alert at three in the morning on your smartphone: That powerful little information machine and surveillance device on your bedside makes you complicit in a web of horrible things: Cell phones rely on the mineral coltan, much of which is mined in underdeveloped countries in conflict regions, with authoritarian governments, worker exploitation and environmental destruction.
As blunt as the message is, as a film, Neptune Frost is explosively celebratory and narratively scrambled. The protagonists include shape-shifting intersex runaway named Neptune (played by Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja), who we first meet at a grave site, declaring: “I was born in my 23rd year.”
Next, we meet Matalusa (Bertrand “Kaya Free” Ninteretse), a coltan miner, who witnesses the killing of his brother before running away from his job. Thereafter, in some ethereal or virtual realm, he meets Neptune, part of a revolutionary hacker collective out to overthrow the big-tech authoritarian regime, and who greet each other with the phrase: “Unanimous goldmine.”
The refusal to be literal is, at least partly, the filmmakers’ way of asserting: Our space, our rules. About 15 minutes into the film, a voice-over asks: “Maybe you’re asking yourself. What the fuck is this? Is it a poet’s idea of a dream?”
There are allegorical characters named Memory, Psychology and Innocent (a bad guy), and a pink messenger bird called Frost which flits in and out. The film’s languages include Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, French, and English.
The appropriately diverse score, mixes African drumming and songs, political chants, jazz, hip-hop and noodling synthesizer arpeggios. Lyrics tend toward the decorative rather than profound (“I count the stars but will they count me?”), though we are left with one memorable proverb: “He who swallows the whole coconut trusts his anus.”
Neptune Frost’s real triumph is the deployment of striking imagery, led by the production and costume design of Rwanda fashion designer, Cedric Mizero, mixing traditional and fashion-forward adornment with technological bric-a-brac (fairy lights on bicycle wheels, circuit boards as jewelry). Co-director Uzeyman’s expressive camera work transitions from lush, pastoral greens to neon pink, twilight blues and milky morning light.
Mostly, it’s how she photographs the performers, who seem to pop out of the frame. As Uzeyman told American Cinematographer last year: "One of the ways we distinguish ourselves is in our colour palette. We wanted to create a mood in which the characters emit a certain quality of light.
“We talked a lot about how to film dark skin tones with a kind of luminescence. It became less a matter of projecting something onto the characters than bringing it out of them, so that they appeared to glow."
Neptune Frost. Directed by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman. Written by Saul Williams. Cast: Trésor Niyongabo, Eric Ngangare, Natasha Muziramakenga. Neptune Frost opens at the Revue Cinema in Toronto on July 10.