Dance, dance, dance
Film review: Rize
Star rating: ****
David LaChapelle's Rize, put simply, is a story about culture and how it develops. The setting is the ghettos of Los Angeles. The stars are the kids that occupy the streets. Daily life is a struggle, a struggle to survive drugs, to survive gangs, to survive family.
This is a film where the kids come across much better than their parents.
Drugs, gangs and dysfunctional families are the burden these kids must bear. There are stories about kids pulling their mothers out of crack-houses, of them being shot up by fathers and stepfathers. This is the story of how some are not prepared to accept that as normal.
Enter Tommy the Clown.
Tommy goes around his neighbourhood in clown suit entertaining birthday parties. He adds dance to his routines and pretty soon has the kids dancing along. But as the kids grow up they don’t stop dancing. They start wearing clown make-up. They form clown troops of their own and a kind of manic street dance scene emerges.
A scene where drugs and gang affiliations are frowned on. Where energy, extreme energy, is the mode of expression.
Then that scene splits into the Clowns and the “Krumpers”, a group that seems to go further into an even more manic dance form that explains the disclaimer at the start of this film telling the viewer “No scenes have been speeded up in this film”.
These kids are dancing out of anger, and out of love, and it’s amazing.
The difference between David LaChapelle the photographer and David LaChapelle the filmmaker is stark. His photographs, often of high fashion and celebrity subjects, are marked by bright colours and all sorts of fantasy and fictional set-ups. They are constructs of one kind or another, sometimes featuring body painting.
His film Rize, on the other hand, is marked by its adherence to a kind of gritty realism. With the exception of one scene there are no noticeable setups at all. This is pure documentary.
In the middle of the film, LaChapelle intercuts historical scenes of African tribes made-up in white face paint doing very similar dances. He takes us to dance competitions, culminating in a dance-off between his Clowns and the Krumpers in a large auditorium. The Clowns win, but the viewer might be forgiven thinking the Krumpers were hard done by.
Tommy, who started it all, goes home to find his house has been burgled while he was at the competition. He cries, picks himself up, and starts again.
These kids are over drugs and drive bys. They want something better. They are over hip-hop too. They have created something of their own and they are proud of it, no matter how strange it may seem to the outsider.
Towards the end of the film we meet a troupe of Chinese, or maybe Korean, clowns. And a white clown too. And we meet a girl clown, killed in a drive by, to whom the film is dedicated.
La Chappelle takes us into a strange world and a strange culture, but one that provides hope and gives us faith that people can rise above their lots in life, that the actions of one good person can help hundreds, if not thousands, find a new way and breaks out of a seemingly endless and vicious cycle.
This is one of the most unusual and one of the most compelling documentaries you are likely to see at a time when amazing true stories are coming to the cinema thick and fast.
See it.
Star rating: ****
David LaChapelle's Rize, put simply, is a story about culture and how it develops. The setting is the ghettos of Los Angeles. The stars are the kids that occupy the streets. Daily life is a struggle, a struggle to survive drugs, to survive gangs, to survive family.
This is a film where the kids come across much better than their parents.
Drugs, gangs and dysfunctional families are the burden these kids must bear. There are stories about kids pulling their mothers out of crack-houses, of them being shot up by fathers and stepfathers. This is the story of how some are not prepared to accept that as normal.
Enter Tommy the Clown.
Tommy goes around his neighbourhood in clown suit entertaining birthday parties. He adds dance to his routines and pretty soon has the kids dancing along. But as the kids grow up they don’t stop dancing. They start wearing clown make-up. They form clown troops of their own and a kind of manic street dance scene emerges.
A scene where drugs and gang affiliations are frowned on. Where energy, extreme energy, is the mode of expression.
Then that scene splits into the Clowns and the “Krumpers”, a group that seems to go further into an even more manic dance form that explains the disclaimer at the start of this film telling the viewer “No scenes have been speeded up in this film”.
These kids are dancing out of anger, and out of love, and it’s amazing.
The difference between David LaChapelle the photographer and David LaChapelle the filmmaker is stark. His photographs, often of high fashion and celebrity subjects, are marked by bright colours and all sorts of fantasy and fictional set-ups. They are constructs of one kind or another, sometimes featuring body painting.
His film Rize, on the other hand, is marked by its adherence to a kind of gritty realism. With the exception of one scene there are no noticeable setups at all. This is pure documentary.
In the middle of the film, LaChapelle intercuts historical scenes of African tribes made-up in white face paint doing very similar dances. He takes us to dance competitions, culminating in a dance-off between his Clowns and the Krumpers in a large auditorium. The Clowns win, but the viewer might be forgiven thinking the Krumpers were hard done by.
Tommy, who started it all, goes home to find his house has been burgled while he was at the competition. He cries, picks himself up, and starts again.
These kids are over drugs and drive bys. They want something better. They are over hip-hop too. They have created something of their own and they are proud of it, no matter how strange it may seem to the outsider.
Towards the end of the film we meet a troupe of Chinese, or maybe Korean, clowns. And a white clown too. And we meet a girl clown, killed in a drive by, to whom the film is dedicated.
La Chappelle takes us into a strange world and a strange culture, but one that provides hope and gives us faith that people can rise above their lots in life, that the actions of one good person can help hundreds, if not thousands, find a new way and breaks out of a seemingly endless and vicious cycle.
This is one of the most unusual and one of the most compelling documentaries you are likely to see at a time when amazing true stories are coming to the cinema thick and fast.
See it.
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