Night Comes On deftly combines the best of mainland European social realist cinema with the gritty edge of female-led indie US filmmaking. It also addresses a lack of representation in these sorts of films, featuring a nearly all-black cast and a lesbian protagonist, which is a welcome reprieve from mostly-white efforts such as Winter’s Bone, Heaven Knows What and the Dardennes’ oeuvre. Fortunately, the movie avoids being yet another of the “Blaxplaination” films that are somehow dominating summer cinema conversations without being very good works of cinema. It’s a remarkable directorial debut for actress Jordana Spiro.
The film’s protagonist is Angel Lemere (Dominique Fishback) who begins the film on the eve of her 18th birthday being released from a juvenile detention facility. She speaks with a hostile parole officer, finds out her girlfriend, with whom she was planning on staying, has moved on to another relationship, gets shaken down by a sleazy underground arms dealer while buying a revolver and visits the foster home where her younger sister is currently staying.
Angel is an orphan, sort of—her father killed her mother but was acquitted—and grew up in foster homes. In a way that viewers versed in social realist cinema from De Sica through Loach will find familiar, she is seen as the victim of both circumstance and her own personal choices. Life and the system, the movie makes clear, has been undeniably harsh to her. She was molested in foster care, ignored by the faceless systemic forces that run US society and left without family to bail her out of bad situations. But Angel has also exacerbated her own lot with poor decisions, such as turning to drugs to cope or immediately violating more or less every condition of her parole from juvenile detention.
She spends the film in a headlong rush for vengeance against her father for murdering her mother. But she is often derailed from her course by the gun dealer, her girlfriend and, most especially, her younger sister, Abby (Tatum Marilyn Hall). The climax of the film is never in doubt once the premise is established, but the path Night Comes On takes to get there is more important than the ultimate resolution of the will-she-or-won’t-she plot propelling the narrative forward.
In true Dardennes’ fashion—and this film gets most of its visual stylings from the Belgian siblings—the camera follows Angel around as she deals with post-release reality. There are few frames that do not include Fishback in them. She is Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night—this film similarly takes place over the course of just two days—darting around for her very survival. This constant tracking from the camera pays dividends throughout Night Comes On; not only does it lend an air of inevitability to the film’s action, but it also features Fishback as she excellently emotes her frustration at every setback she encounters. She gives a grand acting performance throughout the film that also recalls Cotillard.
Night Comes On is nothing new to cinema; in fact, it bears the weight of a 70-year legacy of social realist films and shows the obvious influences of the more famous recent offerings of the genre. But it does populate the frame with black actors and refreshingly does not make the film about black actors telling white people what blackness is like. Many of Angel’s antagonists—representing the faceless anonymous forces of social indifference—are also black, which keeps the focus on social realism and away from trendy blaxplaination. It may mean that the movie is less in the conversation on social media this summer, but also promises that the film will have more lasting impact than zeitgeist-over-substance works like Blackspotting and Sorry to Bother You.
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