‘Landscapes’ a potent political film – Metafiction, drama and magical realism in ‘Time’

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LOS ANGELES, March 5, (RTRS): More than 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the United States, up from 300,000 people 40 years ago, but not only are stats like those absent from Brett Story’s inspired documentary, “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes,” the actual prisons are missing as well. Rather than examine the prison-industrial complex from the inside, Story crisscrosses the country and attacks the issue from varied and surprising angles — some as direct as a Kentucky mining town kept afloat by a federal pen, others as roundabout as a Los Angeles playground designed to ward off registered sex offenders. While the doc eventually tilts into righteous anger, its ingenious conceit subtly and artfully registers how mass incarceration affects society in ways the public can’t always see. The conceptual hook may confine its appeal, but “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” is poised to tunnel into more adventurous festivals and outlets after its True/False premiere.

Composed of 12 vignettes, the film adopts a prismatic approach that may sound like Story’s twist on “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould,” which hails from her native Canada, but she comes at the material from a different vantage. Both films illuminate a complex subject through a series of offbeat perspectives, but “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” has a consistent formal beauty that sets it apart from the earlier film’s deliberate mish-mash of textures. With only seven-and-a-half minutes, on average, to make an impression, Story and her d.p., Maya Bankovic, make concise statements through carefully composed and often dreamily stylized images.

Announcing its eccentricities from the start, the doc opens in Washington Square Park, where a street chess master talks about how he advanced his game in the clink, but that’s the only occasion when the system is made to seem productive. From there, Story visits Eastern Kentucky, where a town ravaged by the coal industry now gets employment opportunities from a federal prison nestled in the mountains. In the Bronx, a former inmate has made a business out of preparing care packages that work around the byzantine restrictions on what items are allowed to pass through the gates. The film gets quirkier, too, in places like Detroit, where the camera gets a guided tour through Quicken Loans’ slick corporate campus downtown, which resembles the gentrified police state dreamed up by the evil OmniCorp in “Robocop.” And it’s equally unexpected to hear the disembodied voice of a female inmate who fights forest fires in Marin County, Calif, but won’t likely get the same opportunity under parole.

Reserves

The placement of each segment has more to do with rhythm than geographical order, but “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” reserves its most damning footage for the last few, which re-enforce the idea of the prison system as a racist, grossly unjust tool of black oppression. Story returns to the street where Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Mo, but puts that incident — and the Black Lives Matter movement — in the context of St. Louis County, where poor African-Americans are constantly fending off police harassment and steep municipal fines. One woman tells a particularly harrowing tale of serving a 15-day sentence around an unpaid garbage-lid fine.

Through its vivid assortment of stories and locales, “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” suggests the prison-industrial complex as an ever-growing, multi-tentacled beast that touches endless aspects of American life. There are forms of incarceration on both sides of the wall — a willingness to accept the limits of prison culture, even when there are no bars. Story has made a potent political film without having to spray viewers with a fusillade of alarming numbers to back it up. She trusts viewers to intuit their way through fascinating anecdotes and detours that gain a cumulative power, one that data alone cannot possibly express.

A terrific idea is unevenly realized in Sergio Andrade and Fabio Baldo’s disappointing “Time Was Endless” an attempt to explore the limbo of a young Amazonian native caught between tribal life and the modernity of Manaus. Striving for, but unable to approach, the lyricism of Andrade’s 2012 feature debut, “Jonathas’ Forest” (which was edited by Baldo), the pic needs a tighter script to tie together the awkwardly assembled elements of metafiction, drama and magical realism. Notwithstanding strong scenes, especially at the start, “Time” won’t be stopping long on the fest merry-go-round.

There’s much promise in the opening sequences, in which tribesmen sedate fire ants and then insert the insects into a specially woven mitt used in an initiation ritual on 11-year-old Anderson (Thiago Almeida). Shot like a documentary, yet without the usual exoticizing elements that so often mar visual representations of such ceremonies, these scenes promise a straightforward, respectful p.o.v. without an anthropological overlay, and while Andrade and Baldo maintain that position throughout, they lose track of narrative cohesion.

Now a young man, Anderson (Anderson Tikuna) lives in a shantytown area of Manaus with his sister (Kay Sara) and her daughter (Ana Sabrina), who has Down syndrome. Tribal custom says the child should be sacrificed, but the siblings refuse to yield to the practice despite intense pressure from back home. In the city, Anderson works on an air-conditioner assembly line and then at a hair salon, but he feels no connection to these places, or to anything in his surroundings.

A very poorly integrated scene finds a spirit, in the guise of a nondescript white guy (Emanuel Aragao), telling Anderson not to forget where he comes from, yet as realized, the confusing incident is superfluous, inducing head scratching rather than offering insight into the young man’s ambivalent relationship to his heritage. Furthering his sense of not fitting in, Anderson is attracted to men. For tribal elders such as the old shaman (Severiano Kedassere), this is additional proof of the corrupting influence of urban life, and Anderson must be brought back to the village to literally straighten him out.

A sympathetic white co-op leader (Rita Carelli) is introduced, but her function is never made clear, and she becomes just one more half-considered piece in this poorly plotted puzzle. Were there a more clearly defined shift in narrative style between the city scenes and the village ones, or between Anderson’s two halves, so to speak, the film might have come together more effectively, but as it stands, “Time Was Endless” strives vainly to make something meaningful of the pressurized duality between so-called modernity and tribal life.

A hint of this comes through in a song Anderson sings, with a line about how there will always be someone to go fishing with. That’s true in the village, but such a traditional sense of community (fraught as it is with intolerance) doesn’t exist in the city, and the song yields one of the film’s sharper moments, in which the young man’s isolation makes an emotional impact. Lensing by Yure Cesar, also d.p. on “Jonathas’ Forest” is generally attractive, keyed to a documentary sensibility. Not all the eclectic choices of music are well used: The lyrics to It’s Immaterial’s 1986 tune “Space” may have a generic contextual significance, yet it’s a bizarre choice for the closing credits.

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