"Ghosts of Cité Soleil": Brothers at war, over politics and a woman
"Power in Haiti is a gun," muses the Port-au-Prince gang leader known as 2Pac in Danish filmmaker Asger Leth's wrenching, relentless documentary "Ghosts of Cité Soleil." I don't know whether he's paraphrasing Mao Zedong on purpose, but you can't totally rule that out. 2Pac is being doleful and reflective, since he's just agreed to a disarmament deal after the 2004 ouster of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, one that he realizes may make him irrelevant.
Leth's film takes no overt position on the contentious question of Aristide and his unfinished Haitian revolution, nor on the coup -- perhaps supported by the United States -- that forced him from office. It's a shocking, fatalistic, street-Shakespearean drama that happens to be true, about two brothers on opposite sides of Haiti's civil war, with a woman between them. 2Pac and his brother Bily, who lead rival gangs of "chimères," or ghosts, in the Western Hemisphere's most dangerous place, emerge as complicated, believable guys. Both could fairly be called murderers, gangsters and thugs, but given another context they'd be something else -- entrepreneurs or musicians or politicians.
2Pac, a lean, charismatic character who laughs easily, already is all those things. Like his African-American namesake, he's a talented rapper (although well short of Tupac Shakur's ever-growing body of work), and he's long served as a de facto city councilman for the 19th district of Port-au-Prince's vast Cité Soleil slum. Originally a pro-Aristide fighter, 2Pac has switched allegiances by the time Leth finds him in 2004 and become an opposition activist. Bily, a moodier, more violence-prone figure, has stayed loyal to the leftist president, and the brothers are on a collision course. In neither case does ideology play much of a role; 2Pac is responding to a perceived personal betrayal, while Bily is remaining true to a tribal allegiance.
Into this political-fraternal drama comes a white French woman called Lele, who's supposed to be in Haiti helping poor children get health care, but gets increasingly drawn into 2Pac and Bily's bewildering mixture of dire poverty, outrageous bling, powerful weed (smoked at all hours) and imminent danger. She flirts with Bily but ends up in 2Pac's bed, and, as sexist as this may sound, I just wanted to slap her. Whether she realizes it or not, Lele is essentially a sex tourist. She can hop on an Air France jet anytime she wants, but 2Pac and Bily are stuck in Cité Soleil, and the consequences of a worsening feud between them are likely to be permanent.
Even without the white-chick problem, "Ghosts of Cité Soleil" is a moving and profoundly upsetting portrait of life near the bottom of the global power pyramid. These guys seem to have inherited the worst consequences of capitalism and the worst aspects of hip-hop culture, all at once. (Not that the two are unrelated.) In one of the film's weirdest little ironies, 2Pac and Lele mostly speak to each other in English -- the international language of crime, sex and business -- even though his Krio dialect and her Parisian French have the same linguistic roots.
It's probably disingenuous to claim, as I did earlier, that Leth's movie has no politics. It has already been attacked (mostly from the left) for its nihilism, with one Haitian-exile site describing it as "a stylized, decontextualized, postmodern, sexy/violent piece of propaganda." (I can't parse the details of intra-Haitian politics, but I gather that Haitian-American rapper Wyclef Jean, who helped produce the film, is anathema to pro-Aristide leftists.) One might quibble over the word "propaganda," always a subjective term, but in other ways that description doesn't go far enough.
What some leftists may have a tough time absorbing is that "Ghosts of Cité Soleil" casts all of Haiti's grim situation in the same stark, amoral light. Leth never apologizes for the coup or idealizes its leaders, some of whom were ex-Aristide supporters and some of whom emanated from the despised old Duvalier regime. Instead, he suggests that Haitian politics -- perhaps all politics, period -- always boils down to brutal, territorial gangsterism, and that in this respect Aristide was no better or worse than his enemies. It's not an uplifting vision of human progress, and what becomes of 2Pac and Bily won't leave you feeling hopeful. If political power is a gun, better not put down your gun.
"Ghosts of Cité Soleil" is now playing in New York and opens July 13 in Los Angeles. Other cities will follow.
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