'The Inheritance': Film Review

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A celebration of Black artists and revolutionaries, Ephraim Asili's debut feature was inspired by Godard's 'La Chinoise.'

Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 mélange of Maoist politics among idealistic young Parisians. With energy and wit, he achieves his goal of creating"a critique and an homage at the same time," but you don't need to be familiar with the earlier work to appreciate. It stands solidly on its own as a dynamic inquiry into revolutionary culture and Black identity, not to mention the challenge of living with roommates.

Twenty-something Julian is moving into his late grandmother's house and clearing out most of its contents, with the crucial exception of her books and LPs — a tangible and tantalizing archive, most of it work by Black artists and writers. He invites his partner, Gwen , to move in with him, and at her suggestion they build a collective household, calling it the House of Ubuntu, a name drawn from a Zulu phrase expressing the value of interconnectedness.

And he offers sly glances at the intricacies of class and race. A conversation between Gwen and Stephanie references a fictitious movie calledThough most of the film was shot in a studio in upstate New York, the director uses West Philadelphia exteriors, murals and storefronts in particular, to strong effect. He deepens the story's sense of place with powerful readings by two Philadelphia-based poets, Sonia Sanchez and Ursula Rucker.

The set he designed takes its cues from Godard's stylized visual language, with its prominent use of onscreen text and its meta slants on performance. Even so, Asili conjures his own world, beginning with the bright, saturated colors of the painted walls. The photographs, magazine covers and posters that his characters hang on those walls are an iconography of the pre-Digital Age.

 

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