Nep­tune Frost – first-look review

In the mes­meris­ing, tech-sat­u­rat­ed Burun­di con­jured by co-direc­tors/life part­ners Saul Williams and Anisia Uzey­man for their unclas­si­fi­able, often mys­ti­fy­ing film Nep­tune Frost, set­ting can safe­ly take prece­dence over plot. The par­tic­u­lars of what’s going on in a knot­ty sto­ry involv­ing actors shar­ing roles, con­ver­sant in a poet­ic dialect that fil­ters char­ac­ter and moti­va­tion through hard-to-parse abstrac­tion, may pose an obsta­cle to first-time view­ers. ​“Unan­i­mous gold­mine,” for starters, serves as a salu­ta­tion between the ​“resource-rich”.

But the sheer wealth of inspi­ra­tion on dis­play, along with the more leg­i­ble themes of globalism’s grow­ing pains, prove more than enough to com­pel a sec­ond view­ing. Williams and Uzey­man work in a mode of rich ideas and vibes, both so plen­ti­ful that the nar­ra­tive oblique­ness feels less alien­at­ing and more like an invit­ing chal­lenge. It earns the atten­tion it demands.

In broad strokes, the script could be said to focus on the inti­mate, for­bid­den bond between on-the-lam inter­sex hack­er Nep­tune (played first by Elvis Ngabo, then Cheryl Ishe­ja) and rebel­lious min­er Matalusa (Kaya Free). There’s a slow-burn­ing love between them, but like the oth­er emo­tion­al cur­rents at play else­where, it’s attuned to a com­plex localised mythol­o­gy befit­ting the project’s ori­gin as a graph­ic novel.

A cat­a­clysmic con­flict between hazi­ly defined fac­tions is a‑brewing, though the stakes – noth­ing short of the soul of Africa, denud­ed of its resources and left by indus­tri­al con­cerns to with­er – are evi­dent. The loose log­ic thread­ing togeth­er the dis­joint­ed scenes does come in handy when the hand­ful of elec­tro-pop musi­cal num­bers set in, our game­ness for what­ev­er odd­i­ty the film can dish out extend­ing to its spon­ta­neous erup­tions into song.

Among the more mem­o­rable sound­track cuts is ​‘Fuck Mr Google’, a scene that lays bare its oppo­si­tion­al stance to the encroach­ing exploita­tion by dig­i­tal con­glom­er­ates. Matalusa labours in a coltan con­cern, a min­er­al used in the man­u­fac­tur­ing of cir­cuit­ry for cell phones and com­put­ers, and the toll they exact informs both the polit­i­cal align­ment as well as the over­all aes­thet­ic with which it coalesces.

Embell­ished by black­lit pops of pur­ple and orange, occa­sion­al­ly fil­tered through an effect sim­u­lat­ing a TV set’s screen, their world imag­ines the dystopia of Mad Max as a more specif­i­cal­ly cyber­punk waste­land. (The Afro­fu­tur­ist cult clas­sic Wel­come II the Ter­ror­dome might be a clos­er point of com­par­i­son.) Everyone’s sur­round­ed by the ruins of gad­get cap­i­tal­ism, with some inte­grat­ing the detri­tus into their fan­tas­tic cos­tum­ing, met­al face masks made of spare wiring and a coat stud­ded with key­board caps being two of the most strik­ing examples.

The crafti­ness with which the char­ac­ters repur­pose these mate­ri­als places them in line with a long, accom­plished tra­di­tion of African art defined by depri­va­tion and inno­va­tion. Whether cook­ing what­ev­er would grow in an arid cli­mate or mak­ing music with any­thing on hand (many of the songs employ this lega­cy of nat­ur­al per­cus­sion and call-and-response rep­e­ti­tion), the pat­tern of this his­to­ry advances from mak­ing do into excelling, the same tri­umphant stand made with the clev­er­ly recy­cled pro­duc­tion design.

Williams and Uzeyman’s call to action sounds out with force and clar­i­ty, how­ev­er tan­gled the path to it may have been. Though impe­r­i­al enti­ties will do their worst in the cam­paign to choke every last dol­lar out of the denizens in the region, the ​“moth­er­board” con­nect­ing all the char­ac­ters through a vir­tu­al chan­nel of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, they won’t be cowed. The giz­mos grow obso­lete, but the peo­ple sub­ju­gat­ed by their cre­ation will endure forever.