Venturing out, Tony, the first-generation Briton, is uncovered to Brixton life — struggling a painful job interview, a landlady’s racist diatribe and a Black preacher who urges his congregation to “drive all black ideas out of your hearts.” Alongside these set items, neorealist footage captures white reactions to the Black individuals they go on the road. Certainly, the streets present Tony’s schooling in double consciousness. “Learn to thieve constructively — for the wrestle,” Colin scolds him when Tony is naïvely caught up in a bungled shoplifting caper.
Colin likes to posture. His affiliate Sister Louise (the American actor Sheila Scott-Wilkinson) gives the speechifying. Her political line, racially conscious and class-conscious — synthesizing the considering of two Trinidadian activists Ové admired, the Black Energy firebrand Stokely Carmichael and the internationalist historian C.L.R. James — brings down the facility of the state within the type of riot police.
Tony’s awakening is triggered by the viciousness with which the police break up a political assembly, brutalize Sister Louise, arrest Colin after which, in a futile seek for medicine, trash his household residence. The destruction precipitates a bitter scene whereby, recognizing the futility of their “white goals,” his mother and father activate one another. The ending is abrupt.
Ové, who died in 2023, loved an extended profession as a documentary filmmaker however directed just one different dramatic characteristic. “Enjoying Away,” launched in america in 1987 (and findable on YouTube), is a comedy written by the Kittitian British novelist Caryl Phillips, positing a cricket match between a white membership in London’s picturesque exurbs and a visiting Brixton group.
“Enjoying Away” is deceptively amiable, though, as if to sign an underlying rage, it offers a gap cameo to the volcanic Lucita Lijertwood, whose mood is a pressure of nature. (She’s an actor who might make Susie Essman wince.) “Enjoying Away” elaborates on C.L.R. James’s remark that “the cricket discipline was a stage on which chosen people performed consultant roles which have been charged with social significance.” The identical could be stated of Brixton, the stage in “Strain.”
Strain
By way of Could 26 at BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn; bam.org.
