Ming of Harlem: Twen­ty One Storeys in the Air

Film view­ing doesn’t get more dis­ap­point­ing than being promised a film about a man liv­ing in a Harlem apart­ment with a Ben­gal tiger, and get­ting a flim-flam­my ​“artis­tic” response to this queer, stranger-than-fic­tion tabloid tale. Ming of Harlem: Twen­ty One Storeys in the Air begins by intro­duc­ing us to the emi­nent­ly chilled Antoine Yates, a man who decid­ed that more than any­thing, he want­ed to con­vert his five-room tow­er block domi­cile into a kind of float­ing zoo. It was only when Ming decid­ed to take a chunk out of his friend­ly captor’s leg that this came to the atten­tion of the author­i­ties and Yates was impris­oned for reck­less endan­ger­ment. Among his oth­er pets was an alli­ga­tor who he referred to as Al.

Direc­tor Phillip War­nell has lit­tle inter­est in using this event as a way to explore a wider cul­tur­al malaise. He’s unin­ter­est­ed in the con­fines of high-rise life, or the things peo­ple feel they can do behind closed doors. Fol­low­ing an intro­duc­tion to Antoine where he talks about what hap­pened while being fer­ried around New York in a cab, the film takes a turn for the dull. There’s a 30-minute inter­lude where we get to see what it might have been like for a tiger to have had free reign with­in an urban prop­er­ty. This shift to con­cep­tu­al art, duly arriv­ing with poet­ry intoned over the top, is a bold gam­bit which doesn’t pay off. The sole take­away from this sequence is that even jun­gle cats are bor­ing if you stare at them doing noth­ing for too long.

The film peters to a close, return­ing to Yates and the band of well-wish­ers who thought that what he did was no bad thing. What’s wrong with keep­ing dan­ger­ous ani­mals in a hous­ing ten­e­ment full of peo­ple? It’s a cor­rup­tion of per­son­al free­dom, man. It’s laud­able that War­nell has cho­sen to reject con­ven­tion in the telling of this sto­ry, but the choic­es he has made in Ming of Harlem serve to turn intrigue into flat-out boredom.