JOHNNY MAD DOG
B+
France Liberia Belgium (93 mi) 2008
‘Scope d: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire
Southern trees bear
strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves
and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in
the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging
from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the
gallant South,
The bulging eyes and
the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia
sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell
of burning flesh!
Here is fruit for the
crows to pluck,
For the rain to
gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot,
for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and
bitter crop
—Billie
Holiday-Strange fruit- HD - YouTube (3:03), 1939
In the opening ten minutes of this movie the audience
witnesses child murders and a rape, where a family comes under the attack of
young rebel forces, an armed band of roving children carrying heavy weaponry
and shouting foul obscenities, searching for food, government soldiers, money,
and other children to recruit, forcing the family to submit at gunpoint, which
includes ordering a young pre-teen son to either shoot his father or be killed,
a rite of passage many of them have experienced first hand. Africa is a
continent that knows continual strife from the everpresent eruptions of violent
and bloody civil wars, where the worst African scenario involves the
conscription of young children who are kidnapped by warlords or local militias
and sent off to the front, usually hopped up on drugs carrying AK-47 assault
rifles, oftentimes never seeing their families again as they have been killed
and their villages burned during the many massacres. One of the more
controversial books written on the subject centers on the fighting in Sierre
Leone, an autobiographical account written by a child soldier who was abducted
at age 13 and is called A Long Way Gone:
Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, though many have questioned the
historical accuracy of a child’s recollections. This movie was shot in
Liberia without ever identifying a country of origin, as the director instead
relies on the viewer’s familiarity with a history of horrific African
atrocities in Rwanda, Liberia, or the Sudan.
This film is a searingly raw and graphically realistic
docudrama that follows one band of rebel soldiers under the command of 15-year
old Johnny Mad Dog (Christophe Minie), who serves ‘Colonel Never Die’ (Joseph
Duo), a mythical warlord who has recruited and trained them all, a fierce
disciplinarian who instills uniformity through repeated profanity-laced mantras
that are memorized and constantly shouted back in unison, especially during
raids, a kind of military call back that mimics boot camp behavior. But
most peculiarly, the children wear whatever they have collected and picked up
from their raids, which amazingly includes a pair of angel’s wings on one
soldier, a red T-shirt claiming “It’s Better in the Bahamas,” a Crucifix, a
white wedding dress, colorful wigs, a crash helmet, and what appear to be
strands of Mardi Gras beads around the neck of Mad Dog. This rag tag
crew, many of whom are themselves former child soldiers from Liberia, look
dressed for a photo shoot before a break dance contest instead of guerrilla
warfare military attire. To prepare them for battle, they are given an
assortment of pep pills, most likely amphetamines and large doses of cocaine
rubbed into their wounds to keep them wired, medicine that the children are led
to believe will keep them invincible. As they enter a nearby city, Mad
Dog is ordered to take out and secure the state-controlled TV station, where
the female news anchor is immediately terrorized and raped by two different
rebel soldiers.
There is a parallel storyline that includes Mad Dog’s chosen
girlfriend that he calls Lovelita (Careen Moore), who he simply picks out of a
group of fleeing civilian refugees, who is the closest thing to someone or
something that he actually cares about, as otherwise these rebels show no
regard whatsoever for human life and are in every sense of the word a terror
organization, perhaps best expressed in a street scene with a young kid
carrying oranges who they assume is an enemy soldier, and who they treat with
full contempt. As they move through the deserted streets openly chanting
their victory songs, they are caught by sniper fire, a riveting scene
reminiscent of Kubrick’s FULL METAL JACKET (1987), where they systematically
track down the line of fire, firing off celebratory bullets into the air
afterwards. Simultaneously the camera follows the tragic storyline of 16
year-old Laokolé (Daisy Victoria Vandy), who tries to move her legless father
and little brother away from the advancing rebel assault, who is continually
seen walking through the perilously dangerous city streets, carrying her
wounded father in a wheelbarrow to the United Nations hospital, eventually
losing both, a prevailing theme in this adrenaline-laced portrait of a world
gone mad, where there is no order but unending terror and chaos, where even if
the rebels were to succeed, it’s inconceivable to even consider their capacity
to lead, as they were designed to seek and destroy and have little use in the
actual rebuilding of the country. They are instead the haunting and
tragic reminders of the ugly scars of war.
Jackson Tennessee Fourgeaud's profoundly unsettling score
casts a pall over the bloodbath of horrors, framing what we see in a new and
different light, offering an anguishing perspective that respects both the
living and the dead, where at one point a rebel soldier’s radio strapped to his
back carries a Martin Luther King speech about the history and ramifications of
slavery, making a strange historical connection to these young children of war
who have been uprooted from their homes and severed from their families
literally for centuries, always serving the agenda of larger unseen powers.
One of the more moving sequences is a seemingly spontaneous song that one
soldier sings after the death of his fellow comrade. The film is an
unending stream of screams, chants, songs, taunts, and slogans, all signs of
propaganda and uneducated youth, as they may not be able to read, but their
choral chants can instill bone-chilling fear. Surprisingly, the most
profoundly moving segment is the end credit sequence, set to a quiet, searingly
personal Nina Simone rendition of “Strange Fruit,” Strange Fruit Nina Simone
Version - YouTube (3:28), an achingly graphic portrait of a Southern
lynching made famous by Billie Holiday. This connection to the roots of
the slave trade is particularly effective, as are the chilling archival photos
of child soldiers dressed up for war, proud to be seen photographed on a roadside
lined with lingering images of atrocities and death.
