The review of Nope, the third film directed by Jordan Peele, creates an ode to the black community in a horror style.
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| Image Credit: Universal Pictures |
There are only three feature films made by Jordan Peele, yet it almost seems that the American filmmaker has been a director all his life, with a cinematographic language so clear and surgical that he has already set a precedent within the new wave of new American horror cinema. In the best of traditions, making horror or taking the path of "genre" cinema means possessing not only a very healthy dose of courage but also an ambition that is out of scale compared to one's colleagues behind the camera. Something that Jordan Peele has never lacked.
At the cinema from Thursday 11 August the highly anticipated Nope, the third feature film written and directed by Jordan Peele, his most ambitious film to date for how it manages to evoke Western cinema and UFO films without suspicion of shameless plagiarism or lack of ideas, combining them with an extraordinary reflection on the ability of men to know how to subject the Nature that surrounds them to their liking. In our review of Nope you will discover how the film written and directed by the director of Scappa – Get Out and Noi is stratified, complex, and ambiguous; a perfect example, perhaps even more than its two previous ones, of a great arthouse show, in search of the impossible.
The plot: mysterious phenomena in Agua Dulce, California
OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) are the only black family that breeds horses for the show business market, a profession they inherited with passion and dedication from their father Otis, who disappeared mysteriously years earlier, when an inexplicable rain of blunt objects came from the sky, fatally wounding the man and causing the disappearance of one of the stable's horses.
A trauma that recurs for the two brothers from Agua Dulce, California, when inexplicable phenomena from the sky reflect with sinister familiarity those that had caused the death of Haywood Sr. One by one, the horses of OJ and Emerald's riding school disappear, sucked into that which at first glance appears like an alien spaceship with a mysterious origin. The Haywoods have no choice but to seize the opportunity, exploit that mysterious phenomenon, and try to capture on a screen the UFO that is causing terror in the vicinity of Agua Dulce. To make a change in their career, they will first turn to a video camera installation professional (Brandon Perea), and then to a Hollywood documentary maker (Michael Wincott). An undertaking bordering on the impossible.
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| Image Credit: Universal Pictures |
In the beginning, there was a monkey
If the premises of Nope appear to be those of a promising sci-fi movie, the viewer must immediately change his mind when these expectations are overturned by an incipit that at first glance is cryptic and difficult to understand: a tame monkey named Gordy, protagonist of a popular TV show, suddenly goes crazy in front of the cameras and kills all the participants in the TV program, except for little Ricky 'Jupe' Park with whom he establishes a surprising relationship of trust and submission. What does the bloody and traumatic past of Ricky Park (Steven Yeun, in the adult version) have to do with the events surrounding the Haywoods, the horse stables, and the Agua Dulce UFO?
The level of thematic and allegorical depth of Nope reveals the American filmmaker's ability to deal with topics of an extremely complex nature: Nope is not just a very successful attempt to superficially pay homage to the science fiction cinema to which it refers (above all, we would like to mention at least Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Robert Lieberman's seminal Glow in the Dark), but it is also a highly ambitious attempt to "capture" on the big screen of a cinema a feat of human ingenuity that only Jordan Peele could have conceived in phase writing.
Monkey, man, horse
In fact, Nope dares to want to celebrate the infinite possibilities of cinema as only the author of Get Out and Noi could have done. The Haywood brothers' exhausting search for the perfect shot of the UFO goes well with a more careful reading of Peele's third feature film; in-depth, Nope is a great spectacle for the eyes and ears (run and see the film in the largest theater near you!) which tells with insight and ferocious entertainment the role of the African American community in the US show business industry of yesterday and today.
In fact, in the first part of the film, Emerald Haywood tells a crew that the first course to be filmed for the cinema was trained by one of their ancestors, emphasizing from the beginning how fundamental the black community was in building the dream industry. Fundamental and yet continually oppressed, bent over the decades by the ingenious supremacy of whites, devoid of gratitude towards it. Yet, it will be Haywood's heirs who will reverse their fate, to subject the creature of the heavens to their will, just as they had done for years and years with the taming of the horses on the ranch; not an easy undertaking, into whose trap the adult Ricky Park falls first despite the bloody experience with Gordy, and then the filmmaker played by Wincott.
Once again, Peele concentrates his witty ingenuity behind the camera in telling a story of all-round black triumph, where the (many) Western and science fiction elements are the perfect wrapping paper with which to present himself once again to his audience hungry for great cinema. A way of (re)writing American history and the role of the black community starting from its founding cinematographic genres.
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| Image Credit: Universal Pictures |
Jordan Peele rewrites the history of American cinema
With his Nope, the American director and screenwriter rewrites the history of the USA and does so by paying homage to the cinematographic genres that have most made the fortune of the Hollywood industry of yesterday and today, the Western and science fiction. Although in the latter case, the authorship of the genre is not exactly American, over the years Hollywood has produced such many films dedicated to UFOs and aliens that it has left a trademark on them which is still very recognizable today; the western, on the other hand, is generally considered to be the first film genre of American origin.
It is therefore no coincidence that Nope also works perfectly as a post-modern Western perfectly subjected to Peele's poetics. Here, the prototypical white cowboy gives way to the trainers of dark-skinned horses, grappling with a mission at the limits of human knowledge: to capture the impossible anomaly of an alien creature that reaps victims and terror from the sky and knowing how to appease and tame it to its own liking.
A "dirty" job which in Jordan Peele's fantasy story becomes reality for the African-American community, a source of pride and revenge against the backdrop of an example of great entertainment cinema which playfully fails to keep its own great ambitions at bay, at the constant search for the impossible. But in the fiction of the big screen of a cinema, even the impossible can finally become reality.