Night of the Kings

Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings opens on an extend­ed over­head shot of an Ivo­rian jun­gle. It lasts just long enough to make you feel lost in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent world. And soon enough, that ini­tial gam­bit imme­di­ate­ly pays off. A young man (Bakary Koné) arrives as a new inmate in an unruly prison that’s com­plete­ly gov­erned by its inmates, under a de fac­to leader named Black­beard who goes by the title Dan­gôro (Steve Tientcheu).

Black­beard then names the new inmate as their ​“Roman” for the night before he prop­er­ly set­tles into the prison. Not know­ing what exact­ly being a ​“Roman” entails, and not entire­ly giv­en a choice in the mat­ter, he accepts. The stakes rise when the new inmate realis­es that what the Roman does is get on a podi­um and tell a long sto­ry to the entire prison but, when his sto­ry ends, he gets murdered.

The sto­ry Roman decides to tell is that of his for­mer gang leader named Zama King, who has just been slain via mob jus­tice in the streets of Abid­jan. Zama King is based on a real-life gang leader (also called ​‘Zama’, inspired by the name of local sour fruits) who died under sim­i­lar circumstances.

The real-life Zama named his gang Les Microbes after the gang in Fer­nan­do Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s City of God. Lacôte wise­ly uses that as his main influ­ence in this film, as it merges its flash­backs and present-day mate­r­i­al bril­liant­ly to give an immense depth to what drove Zama King. It also pays homage to Jenet Genet’s 1947 play ​‘The Maids’ in how ani­mat­ed the inmates are when Roman is recount­ing his tale.

As impres­sive and com­plex as the film is, it los­es some of its allure when the sto­ry begins adding ele­ments of mys­ti­cism to an oth­er­wise very ground­ed con­text. This mix of time­lines and styles sud­den­ly becomes quite jar­ring and the CGI used is not very con­vinc­ing – it risks tak­ing you out of the sto­ry com­plete­ly. But just as things start mean­der­ing the film quick­ly returns to its main focus and those incur­sions into mys­ti­cism even­tu­al­ly do pay off. At a cer­tain point, even the inmates start crit­i­cis­ing Roman, ques­tion­ing his story’s plot holes. They start draw­ing ter­ri­fy­ing con­clu­sions: that he’s only try­ing to extend his peri­od at the podi­um so that they don’t kill him.

There’s a deep­er lay­er to the film where you start explor­ing the main themes and real­ize that the Zama King sto­ry was ulti­mate­ly used as a Trojan’s horse to guide us into scru­ti­niz­ing the post-elec­tion vio­lence that occurred in Ivory Coast post the arrest of for­mer Pres­i­dent Lau­rent Gbag­bo. It plays like a fine polit­i­cal alle­go­ry when you start rec­og­niz­ing all the inter­nal pol­i­tics of the prison mir­rors the Ivo­rian sit­u­a­tion; Blackbeard’s time as the Dan­gôro is run­ning out and Lass (Abdoul Karim Konaté) wants to take over – not to improve the inmates’ lives.

“Black­beard treat­ed them like slaves, we shall treat them like cus­tomers”, he says, how­ev­er char­ac­ters like Half-Mad (Jean Cyrille Dig­beu) also want the throne too, and they’re ready to fight for it. There’s also an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter named Silence (Denis Lavant), who appears to rep­re­sent the silence of the broad­er West­ern soci­ety dur­ing these tumul­tuous times.

What Lacôte achieves here in his sec­ond fea­ture, by mix­ing doc­u­men­tary and fic­tion styles and also genre-bend­ing to near break­ing point is remark­able. The dif­fer­ent ele­ments end up com­ple­ment­ing one anoth­er and sup­plies the view­er with a unique cin­e­mat­ic experience.

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