2024-04-03 08:30:15
by Maurizio Porro
On Netflix the film by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya which has as its protagonist a real estate stratification of the metropolis
We now feel a certain suspicion, even irritation, when faced with the use of the dystopian adjective in vogue in social fantasy cinema such as this «The Kitchen» which bears the double signature, Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, Oscar of «Judah and the black Messiah”, a film for which he also won the Golden Globe and the Bafta in 2021. This time the much-watched film on Netflix really has the value of a hybrid temporality that we suspect is very close to us even if we would prefer to distance it in fantasy: but we are in London presided over by the area of building speculation of the rich, with all the skyscrapers on the rise, and a last neighborhood of underprivileged which gives the toponymic title.
Kitchen in fact: abandoned neighborhood of poor souls who live in inhumane conditions, almost all black, surrounded by the new city which controls them with drones, cuts off their water and food: these are the slums, without even the need to go underground like the shelters of the Kiev subways and closely resemble the literary visions of the past, from Hugo to Gorkji, the universe of the poor, humiliated and offended: Les Misèrables. In this context the film lights the melodramatic but without emphasis fuse of paternal recognition, when the very young Benji (and Jedajah Bannerman stands out) meets a man, Izi, who perhaps could be his father (the rapper Kane Robinson), who dreams of escape to an apartment with all the comforts.
With him the denied grown-up child shares pieces of a difficult and stray life, extraordinary and ordinary adventures of a dirty and poisoned metropolitan strip, outside of every civil and human rule, as we have already seen in ’82 in “Blade Runner”, the reference simpler and more identifiable, and in many other stories not only fantasy where we suspect that the temporal gap, precisely their dystopian being, is not that wide after all, it is something that knocks on the door of our social unconscious and we are going to open it. The first work of the English actor of «Scappa – Get Out» and of his architect and filmmaker friend convinces precisely in its predominant scenographic configuration, of unhealthy fascination.
The real protagonist is this area of archaeological real estate stratification, this Pompeii of the former miracle, as if the boom years had given way in the face of the rise of another civilization of well-being that widens the social gap, as is happening in the large cities not excluding Milan. There was talk of retro-futurist design by a cinema that looks to a past that has quickly changed its temporal connotations, becoming the mirror of the degraded neighborhood of a future city where soon there will be no more “kitchen”, only skyscrapers. The meanders, tunnels and bowels of these slums are very well crafted but they push us upwards, this joyless city that is socially. It is the desperate but visible and dramatic evolution of Lang’s Metropolis (underground, hidden) and where even clothing is eternally marked by signs of vintage wear, just as the kitchen uses elementary utensils such as cutlery and bowls where one slops Ramen and shared toilets are on every floor of the dilapidated tower block.
We see very little of the rest of the world, but obviously we imagine it, you just need to think about the opposite to have the political vision of the film, which is strongly marked by this vein of family rediscovery, forever in doubt, by the slow growth of a very special affection between the boy and the unsmiling man who could have fathered him (we are talking about the woman who could be the mother). And if Benji has an easy time dedicating himself to theft for good purposes, risking prison every day, his father would only like to escape from a ghetto of physical and moral decadence: it is difficult for the two to begin an emotional journey and it is equally difficult to ignore it, they are in the same situation, with a baggage on their shoulders that sometimes makes them feel close. And it is precisely the alliance that is the signal hope of the directors, love that is almost an option which, if it comes, comes later: first the belly, then the virtue as Brecht sang with Kurt Weill’s songs in the “Threepenny Opera”. The residents of «The Kitchen» can join the chorus.
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April 3, 2024 (modified April 3, 2024 | 10:29)
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