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| Writer/director Raven Jackson |
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| Jomo Fray, Kaylee Nicole Johnson, and Raven Jackson |
ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT B USA (92 mi) 2023 d: Raven Jackson
A meditative and visually intoxicating film, more like a lyrically contemplative photo essay than a movie, made by an award-winning filmmaker, poet, and photographer from Tennessee (but her mother and grandmother are from Mississippi) with a Master’s Degree from both New York University’s Graduate Film Program and the New School’s Writing Program. Jackson explores rural Mississippi landscapes with indefinable human experiences and emotions, seemingly spawned from Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), while mixing in the dreamy and poetic resonance of Terrence Malick, specifically the near wordless To the Wonder (2012) or the transcendent 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life, exploring the immensity of the natural world around us with the tiny, claustrophobic space we actually inhabit. As if inspired by a different era, the film recalls David Gordon Green’s lyrical George Washington (2000) or early Lynne Ramsay shorts like Small Deaths (Lynne Ramsay, 1996) - YouTube (11:13) or GASMAN (1998), Gasman Lynne Ramsay 1997 YouTube (14:30), where we almost never see the completeness of any scene, yet the intimacy on display is stunning, with the title referring to the practice of eating clay dirt, a common practice among poor blacks who live in rural areas of the American South, with suggestions that in the most remote corners of the earth, in the backroads, there are a multitude of tears that go unseen by the rest of the world, yet ultimately this deeply introspective film is about connection. Premiering at Sundance in 2023, this is the second A24 film produced by noted director Barry Jenkins following the success of 2023 Top Ten List #7 Aftersun (2022), as the National Board of Review lists it among their Top 10 Independent Films of the year, with a visual design inspired by a 2017 book of photography (William Ferris: The South In Color) in rural Warren County and throughout Mississippi that features 100 color photographs from the 1960’s and 70’s, including the Rose Hill Church that is featured in the film. Shot along the tributaries of the Yazoo River, the 35mm cinematography by Jomo Fray is nothing less than stunning, creating a bold, impressionistic mosaic that follows a young black girl’s life in rural Mississippi through various stages in her life, using three different actresses to play her, told in a non-narrative, stream-of-consciousness style that accentuates a lingering internalized expression of life itself, embracing joy and pain, heartbreak and grief, exploring shared moments in a life that connects the surrounding natural world to an existing black culture, creating an intersection between cinema and photography in a quietly reflective tapestry of interwoven, interior realms, themes in common with Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama (2023). There’s something very unique in Southern communities that’s specific to the region, whether it’s the soil, the people, the culture, or the conditions, and art has a lot to do with it.
The unconventional nature of this decades-spanning film is startling, intentionally breaking conventions, told in a very unorthodox manner, much like poetry where you experiment and play around with form, as this is basically a series of kaleidoscopic vignettes all strung together, jumping back and forth in time with no narrative link, feeling more random, leaving viewers in a freefall of associative imagery surrounding a single character, Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson), short for Mackenzie, a little girl in pigtails seen in the opening learning to fish in the river with her father Isaiah (Chris Chalk), where she’s just as interested in stirring the mud in the dirty water, establishing an early link with the world around her, while we also hear the sounds of birds chirping and cicadas buzzing in the forest setting. Bringing their catch home, they have enough for a fish fry, with her mother Evelyn (Sheila Atim) showing her the proper way to use a knife to skin it while her father scales the fish, where these parental instructions have been passed down through the ages. We cut to scenes of joy and innocence, with Mack riding her bike through town, racing her childhood friend Wood (Preston McDowell), or joined by her younger sister Josie (Jayah Henry, with an imprinted birthmark on her eyelid), seen practicing kissing on the back of their hands before jumping ahead into a different time period, as her mother teaches her how to put lipstick on, with Mack changing to Charlene McClure in high school, Josie to Moses Ingram, and Wood becoming Reginald Helms Jr. Using as little dialogue as possible, Jackson exposes flashes of memory, which allows these recurring images to linger in your imagination before moving on to another incident, like witnessing a tragic fire to the Mack family home, where a frantic feeling of pain and helplessness registers, showing how easily a home can be stripped away, as systematic displacement was a prominent theme for blacks in the 1970’s. Edited by Lee Chatametikool, a frequent collaborator with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, you get different versions of these same characters at different stages in their lives, as it’s an experimental coming-of-age yet also cycle-of-life film, with carefully chosen moments from a single person’s life, showing how our relationship changes with the world around us as we grow, yet something intrinsically familiar remains, which are the traditions passed on by each successive generation. Very little happens on the surface, with Jackson instead channeling what’s going on underneath the surface, challenging the audience to trust their emotions, where there’s even a companion book accompanying the film release, Stories From a Place Where All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Mostly expressed in long takes, where hands, in particular, seem to have been singled out to symbolize loving affection, they are the connecting tissue between disparate moments, creating a state of grace, like an homage to French filmmaker Robert Bresson.
The critique of the film is how much patience is required and how difficult it is to establish an emotional connection with what might feel like an incoherent experimental narrative, as this is a style over substance film, where the use of music is sparingly used, but an early standout scene shows Mack’s parents slow-dancing to Gladys Knight & The Pips "If I Were Your Woman" on The Ed ... YouTube (2:36) and Roberta Flack’s Roberta Flack "Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye".wmv YouTube (4:20), a foreshadowing moment where the romantic mood from the evocative 1970’s lyric immediately transitions to the sudden death of her mother, with the funeral taking place at the Rose Hill Church (returning later for a gorgeously realized wedding scene), captured in a picturesque verdant setting sitting atop a hill. We float from one sequence to the next, like a reverie, as past and future spill into the present, sweeping us through various stages of time, as Mack and Wood lament the life they never had together in a long-held embrace, where their once promising romance faded away when she was unwilling to leave with him to pursue a better life, yet they have unmistakable chemistry between them. Rather than spelling out plot points, Jackson evokes Mack’s inner life through the sights, sounds, textures, and emotions that have stuck with her over decades, infusing the timeless poetry of water, dirt, wind, and rain, with repeated shots of rivers and thunderstorms, and the muddied soil, as the timeline is marked by subtle changes in Mack’s braided hairstyles, where heritage and history are an ongoing ritual that continually restages the past, transforming what we see into something sacred and precious. When Mack becomes a mother of her own, with an infant baby pressed warmly to her chest, she is reminded of her own mother, where one of the more striking scenes shows Evelyn holding Mack as an infant, rocking her in her arms, demonstrating how traditions are carried from one generation to the next, evoking a special bond between mothers and their daughters. In another scene, a pregnant Mack lies in her bathtub, and in the next, we see Evelyn bathing Mack as a toddler in the very same tub, yet her discernible fear of motherhood drives Mack to reluctantly give her child to Josie to raise, a conspicuous moment expressed mostly through glances across a kitchen table. Zainab Jah is a somewhat older Mack, seen lost in her own reflections by the river, where a stream of hypnotic imagery offers context for the memories she is processing, which may in fact be the film we are watching. There is no beginning and no end, Mack says to her young daughter Lily (Robin Crudrup) as she talks about the water from the rain, instead “it just changes form.” Inspired by black family albums that are kept oversized, preserving relatives behind hard plastic, they act as portraits of recorded American history without the stifling racial exclusions from prejudice and bigotry, a true narrative of America, where the walls of the home also include framed portraits of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, staples in black households during the 70’s. The sound design by Miguel Calvo is astonishing in its detail, as Jackson sculpts a captivating portrait of black heritage and identity through languorous tones, abstract textures, and a female perspective grounded in place and community.
