ear for eye

The remark­able sec­ond fea­ture from writer/​director deb­bie tuck­er green, whose work thus far has pre­dom­i­nant­ly been for the stage, hits you direct­ly in the solar plexus in its open­ing frames. This is an adap­ta­tion and a remix of her 2018 pro­duc­tion ​‘ear for eye’, a vignette-based port­man­teau in three chap­ters which col­lects togeth­er frag­ments of con­ver­sa­tions, con­fronta­tions, argu­ments, speech­es and con­fes­sions that are all based around ques­tions of race, iden­ti­ty and oppression.

The stall is set in the open­ing scene when a Black moth­er and a son attempt to enter into a com­plex dis­cus­sion about their rela­tion­ship and the gen­er­a­tional schism that exists between them, only for the words to sud­den­ly cut off, as if these are feel­ings that are impos­si­ble to express. The stac­ca­to rhythms of the dia­logue deliv­ery lend the sequence a musi­cal­i­ty that belies the trag­ic notion of a com­plete break­down in com­mu­ni­ca­tion, where the direc­tor appears to be sug­gest­ing that if a moth­er and son are unable to enter into a con­ver­sa­tion about the nature of their rela­tion­ship, then what good will it be for any­one else?

Anger, con­fu­sion and regret dom­i­nate the dis­course, as we flit between the UK and US with var­i­ous dif­fer­ent pair­ings and con­texts. A theme that runs through the open­ing chap­ter is the pan­dem­ic of police bru­tal­i­ty against Black peo­ple, dealt with most vis­cer­al­ly in a seg­ment in which a woman pris­on­er talks about her expe­ri­ence being tear-gassed. Anoth­er seam of inquiry is the nature of polit­i­cal sol­i­dar­i­ty and how it is expressed through activism, as seen in a seg­ment in which two friends argue over meth­ods of engage­ment, and whether a slow, thought­ful, con­stant bat­tle out­weighs a sud­den, fair weath­er explo­sion of rage.

All of this plays out on a blank sound­stage with visu­al impo­si­tions and asides appear­ing at vital junc­tures. tuck­er green is inno­v­a­tive in the way she cap­tures the mate­r­i­al, bring­ing a rad­i­cal and unique­ly cin­e­mat­ic visu­al schema to some­thing which, in less­er hands, may have felt like filmed the­atre. Much con­sid­er­a­tion has gone into fram­ing, jux­ta­po­si­tion and com­po­si­tion, all with the eye of a cam­era rather than a the­atre audi­ence in mind. This in turn helps to retain the sear­ing pow­er of the words while offer­ing a fresh way to con­sume and process them.

The high­light arrives in the sec­ond chap­ter in which a blue-haired Lashana Lynch plays an inquis­i­tive stu­dent who faces off against her white uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor (Demetri Gorit­sas). This sequence rolls out like a one-act play (recall­ing David Mamet’s sim­i­lar­ly-styled ​‘Olean­na’), in which Lynch’s char­ac­ter press­es and stands her intel­lec­tu­al ground in her ques­tion­ing of the professor’s meth­ods and ethics in a con­tentious paper about a school shoot­ing. Sys­temic racism is pre­sent­ed in the professor’s con­stant recourse to caus­tic microag­gres­sions and a form of rhetoric that inher­ent­ly patro­n­is­es, where the pro­fes­sor sim­ply refus­es to equal­ly engage with the stu­dent on a lev­el of basic politesse.

Final­ly, the film clos­es with a haunt­ing col­lec­tion of to-cam­era mono­logues in which white peo­ple read out the many racist laws that have been enact­ed over the last few cen­turies. It’s a bold cli­max which serves to empha­sise just how futile the fight for racial equal­i­ty is and will be with­out real, fun­da­men­tal change.

eye for eye will pre­mière on 16 Octo­ber at the BFI Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val, BBC Two and iPlayer.