Review: Night of the Kings Is a Vivid Paean to Oral Traditions as Lifeblood

The film is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives.

Night of the Kings
Photo: Neon

Writer-director Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings begins with a young man (Bakary Koné) sitting in the back of a pickup truck as if on an ordinary excursion through the streets of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The first indication that things might not be so routine comes when a looming fence of barbed wire comes into view in the background of the frame as the truck continues its journey. And another more pertinent clue comes with the revelation that the man is sitting across from a uniformed officer holding an assault rifle, clarifying that the young man is a convict about to enter the La MACA prison.

Early on, we see the new inmate being slapped around by the warden, Nivaquine (Isaka Sawadogo), but Lacôte otherwise suggests that the prison is largely administered by the inmates themselves, who’ve managed to achieve a sense of normalcy during their captivity. The young man’s arrival is greeted with deafening jeers and pounding on metal bars, and Lacôte’s film quickly establishes the prison as a place run on a strict hierarchy, as well as rituals of behavior including the taunting of a crossdressing youth (Gbazy Yves Landry) who’s made to strip before being shoved back and forth between other prisoners. The camera rushes along the hallways that snake around the facility in sync with the pent-up energy of the inmates, capturing the way their activities give shape to their lives.

The unofficial leader of the prisoners, Blackbeard (Steve Tientcheu), is a lion in winter, gigantic and imposing but also dependent on an oxygen machine. He holds sway over the others by directing various vaguely mystical activities, believing so strongly in the customs that have been passed down among prisoners over the years that he even commits, however reluctantly, to the honored tradition of head prisoners killing themselves when they become too weak to lead. Preparing for this moment of absolution, Blackbeard calls for the new arrival to become the new “Roman,” a storyteller tasked with spinning yarns as entertainment, with the threat of being hung on an iron hook if he fails to hold everyone’s attention.

Advertisement

Koné’s unlucky Scheherazade-like character thus finds himself at the center of an explosion of activity as the other prisoners prepare for this ritualistic evening; even the guards clear out of the prison courtyard as everyone fills the space, knowing that to let the activity play out will help to keep the peace. When Roman finally starts to speak, he does so haltingly, stumbling for a story topic before settling on the local legend of a recently killed young criminal, Zama King. Lacôte films the man patiently, regarding the way he slowly finds his footing both in the story and as a storyteller. Remarking that his own grandmother was a griot, Roman seems to gain confidence merely from voicing that fact, as if hitting upon the idea that her talent might be hereditary. Soon, Roman is riffing on the story of a good kid from a bad part of town, a product of Abidjan’s “Lawless Quarter” who was born set on a course for destruction.

As Roman attempts to keep the story going to outpace his own doom, though, he begins to revise little details, such as Zama now having been born in an ancient village. As Roman keeps improvising, he transforms a realistic account of a young criminal’s life into an elaborate, time-hopping fantasy, one that includes tribal monarchs and even a duel between magicians. Lacôte visualizes the story with cutaways to both present-day Abidjan and the tribal huts and unmolested jungles of a pre-colonial Africa, and there’s a striking visual dynamism to the contrast in Tobie Marier-Robitaille’s cinematography between the cold, metallic hues of the La MACA prison and the bright light and earth tones of the imagined ancient land.

Yet the most striking aspect of the film is the way in which the prisoners begin to act out Roman’s story, voicing characters and even engaging in interpretive song and dance as if possessed by the spirit to act. The camera regularly shifts away from Roman to move in lockstep with the prisoners’ contortions and twirling movements, resulting in a poetry of motion that illuminates his improvised tale better than the actual depictions of it.

Advertisement

While the Sword (or hook, rather) of Damocles hangs over Roman’s head, the film spends considerably more time on the ominous fate awaiting Blackbeard and the rippling impact of his imminent departure. Lass (Abdoul Karim Konaté), an underling who’s set to inherit the throne, remarks that he’s grown weary of Blackbeard’s mysticism and looks forward to imposing a more “rational” order to keep the other inmates in line. “The prisoners must stop being our slaves, and become our customers,” he tells his crew. Yet as Roman’s story unfurls, the wisdom of the initially bizarre, arcane custom that Blackbeard keeps alive becomes clear.

Lass works behind the scenes to consolidate his coming ascension as Roman speaks, but eventually he, too, is hypnotized by the strange catharsis of the improvised story. Despite its bleak context, Night of the Kings is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives. That a film so frequently harrowing can so often feel joyous without every trivializing the state of its characters’ imprisonment is a testament to the way that Lacôte resolutely finds the meaning embedded within ritual, and how the activities of the inmates, however strange, constitute routines every bit as normalizing as the daily tasks of those living their lives outside the walls of the prison.

Score: 
 Cast: Bakary Koné, Issaka Sawadogo, Steve Tientcheu, Abdoul Karim Konaté, Rasmané Ouédraogo, Denis Lavant, Laetitia Ky, Gbazy Yves Landry  Director: Philippe Lacôte  Screenwriter: Philippe Lacôte  Distributor: Neon  Running Time: 93 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.