The African Desperate Review: Martine Syms’s Corrosive, If Cynical, Satire of Disaffection

In Martine Syms’s corrosive satire The African Desperate, art school is a kind of mental slavery. The farcical opening scene, in which our Black protagonist, Palace (Diamond Stingily), defends her sculpture thesis before a panel of all-white professors, wastes no time in rolling out the film’s finely honed bullshit detector. The panel’s comments range from competitively well-meaning to evasive to brazenly racist, with Syms and co-writer Rocket Caleshu nailing the obscurantism of academic art-jargon with such sincerely delivered lines as “in Palace’s work, the impossible trajectory of hope becomes the ground where irony and advice dance together in frightening hallways, alive with languor and vitality.”

Palace responds to each comment in gloriously deadpan fashion, never rising to the bait. As soon as the discussion starts to get thorny, the professors skip to the end, clinking their little plastic cups of wine a few too many times, as though congratulating themselves instead of Palace. One of the professors, Hans (Joey Cantillon), tellingly says to her: “That’s it. You’re free.”

But Palace isn’t free. There’s still the end-of-semester party that night. Palace is supposed to catch a train early the next morning and get back to Chicago to take care of her mother, who’s battling lupus. She plans to opt out of the party as a protest, but her fellow students—mostly white, running the gamut of art-school caricatures—beg and cajole her to attend. After all, she promised to DJ! She meets their entreaties with the same deadpan she used on her professors.

It would be easy to focus overmuch on the post-ironic armor with which Palace deflects a racialized absurdity, but in fact she retunes her affect in subtle gradations depending on who she’s interacting with. Her warmth shows through, for instance, when at the lake with her friend and roommate, Hannah (Erin Leland), whereas her patience all but snaps in the presence of Fern (Erin Kelly Meuchner), who resents Palace’s desire to be alone. And when she’s alone, we see the dance in her movements or the tears streaming down her face. Her disaffected posture is one of many in her code-switching arsenal. The range of her performativity becomes clear in a brief scene where she parodies (or does she?) a make-up instruction video.

The African Desperate is an internet-savvy film, and one that’s obviously been made for streaming. The opening credits cycle by too fast to be read, while the memes that occasionally pop up in the corner of the frame, gesturing at Palace’s subliminal thoughts, don’t stick around long enough to be processed without the pause button. Passing references to theorists like Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, and Édouard Glissant assume prior familiarity or demand that viewers at home pause to bring up a Wikipedia page.

Synced to the glitchy rhythms of an electronic score by Aunt Sister, Colin Self, and Ben Babbit, the film’s editing reflects this hyperlink mentality, recalling Zadie Smith’s assertion that novelists need no longer describe real-world objects or places in detail; a reader can Google them in a fraction of the time. This breakneck style captures the ephemeral, hermetic atmosphere of both the art scene and online culture, which can seem caught up in a virtual arms race to those on the periphery. The African Desperate embodies this feeling, at once exhilarating and anxiety-inducing, while sharing Palace’s leery outsider’s stance toward it.

Palace ends up not only attending the party but taking a lot of drugs—some by accident—so that the film’s latter half, willfully disorienting and drenched in nightmarish glare, starts to look something like Gaspar Noé’s Climax. As much as the chemicals in her system, it’s the alienated hedonism of her fellow students that incites Palace’s nausea. Freedom from mental slavery, if that’s what she’s experiencing here, is a grueling ordeal, a bad trip, and the hangover’s worse, but bad decisions are still decisions, and Palace emerges without regrets.

That The African Desperate is a send-up of art school is beyond doubt, but what’s less clear is just how far the satire goes. To be sure, the institutional racism of academia doesn’t come out unscathed, and from there we might extrapolate to the art world at large, but Syms’s film doesn’t much concern itself with the “real world” outside of school that it occasionally alludes to. With its casual referentiality and self-conscious style, it’s in danger of only addressing the milieu it sets out to trash. It may be that only current or former MFA students will be able to fully appreciate the satire, and if so, the film amounts to little more than an exercise in cynicism.