Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Jenelle Monae, Jena Malone, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons, Arabella Landrum, Tongayi Xhirisa, T.C. Matherne, Robert Aramayo, Marque Richardson, London Boyce, Bernard Hocke, Dayna Schaaf, Gabourey Sidibe, Todd Voltz, Lily Cowles, Caroline Cole, Geraldine Glenn, Grace Junot, Victoria Blade.
We are only ever one heavy boot kicking in our door away from returning to a time when people are placed into a camp and treated less than human, that the Jewish woman has her shorn and is ordered into striped clothes, to where the black man is reduced to the position where his ancestors fought to rise against the insidiousness of his oppression and captivity, where the working class are forced into ghettos and the filth, and all because of the nature of humanity which dictates there must always a system of slave and master in place.
No matter how hard we try, what has desecrated our past, has the opportunity to happen once more, and unless we are forever vigilant in fighting back against oppression, unless we keep making it clear that such coercion and patronage of tyranny is as unconscionable as being the one to hold the whip, the baton and the extortionate rent agreement, then we will find ourselves back in the days when death camps rose out of the ground in Europe and the Antebellum was the grand façade of racism in the American south.
When fascism and racism become so entrenched in the community, the only way it can go forward without all-out war consuming everybody is to clothe itself in the realms of entertainment, the antithesis of education, the contrast to perpetual learning of the ills of humanity is to create what is in effect a theme park dedicated to the experience of persecution and charge thirty Dollars for what they describe as the pleasure.
We should be worried about the kicking on of the door, for as Antebellum portrays, it can come at any time and present itself as respectability, and the similarities between the age of slavery which spurred on the American Civil War and the reasons behind the Black Lives Matter movement are sadly all too familiar.
It is in the performances of Janelle Monáe as Victoria/Eden, Jenna Malone as Elizabeth and Jack Huston as Captain Jasper that makes the film a compelling mystery thriller, and yet at the back of the mind the audience no doubt understand they have also bought regrettably into the idea of entertainment at the behest of another’s suffering.
The question behind the film is perhaps stark, at what point does education turn into recreation, into an attraction, and how we come to terms with others suffering without turning it into a sideshow is one on the edge of our tongues.
Antebellum is an excellent film none the less, the reminder of just how close we can cross the line from being decent to one another to the slave/master diversion which has stalked and damaged our humanity since time immemorial.
Ian D. Hall